Nervous system regulation is a worthy goal: your body and mind can heal when your nervous system is able to regulate. When your nervous system is dysregulated, it will be harder for you to relax, sleep, and heal. I’d like to share some simple tips for nervous system regulation (NSR), but first, let me explain what NSR is.
So what is nervous system regulation? In very simple terms, it means that your nervous system (NS) is able to move smoothly between different states in response to the conditions you are living in.
For example, if a fire alarm goes off, your body should send you into the “fight or flight” state – preparing your body to get to safety immediately. Your heart rate increases, your NS sends more blood to your arms and legs to help you run for the door, your respiration rate will speed up, and functions of your body that are not needed in an emergency situation (such as digestion) will be put on the back burner until the danger has passed. This happens automatically – your body takes over and puts you in the appropriate state to survive and be safe. But it is equally important that your nervous system is able to return to the “rest and digest” state when it is appropriate to do so. To stick with our example: after the alarm is off and you are back in a safe place, you should be able to calm down. Your heart rate and breathing will slow down again and you will be able to do things like sleep and digest your food (things that are not possible when your NS is telling you that you need to run out the door ASAP).
There are times when the fight or flight state (known as the sympathetic state), the rest, digest & recover state (known as the parasympathetic state, or ventral vagal state) are appropriate and needed to keep you safe and alive. However, when we can’t move between these states easily, we have a dysregulated NS. This is when we need help in building more nervous system regulation; in essence, more resilience and flexibility in our NS.
There is a third state in our nervous system: shut down (known as the dorsal vagal state). This occurs when your NS perceives a threat to be too big and overwhelming to fight or run from. It is a version of “playing dead” in the face of a fight we can’t win.
Trauma can make this more complicated. Conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD (C-PTSD) mean that a threat that a person has experienced in their life has left its mark on their NS so that when memories of that trauma are triggered, their NS responds to these triggers in an exaggerated way. This means that even if the threat happened many years ago, having the memory of it triggered will cause their NS to respond exactly as if the threat was happening at that moment. So they may be thrown into the sympathetic or dorsal vagal states when that is not actually necessary. In this case, nervous system regulation is badly needed (and often hard to accomplish). When your NS takes over, you can’t always think your way out of it. Saying “just calm down” is fundamentally misunderstanding what is happening in the body of a person with PTSD or C-PTSD.
So….what does all of this have to do with osteopathy? It is my aspiration to help you come back to a healthy balanced place in your body. Healing happens when your NS is able to regulate when we can com back to the parasympathetic (or ventral vagal) state (let’s call this the safety state). Osteopathy can have a role in helping your body come back into balance, which can positively impact your nervous system. And, there are many tools that you can engage in after osteopathic treatment to help your system learn to regulate (some of which I will be sharing with you in the following posts).
Osteopathy is a manual therapy that seeks to bring the body’s structures into balance in order to relieve pain and help all the functions of your body operate more optimally. And NS regulation is something that happens in the body. Many assume that all of this is in our head. Your brain is part of your body! Your nervous system consists of your brain, spinal cord, and a vast network of nerves that communicate with all regions of your body. When your NS sends you into these different states, it isn’t merely prompting you to think “I’m going to run now;” it is mobilizing your physiology to respond automatically to enable the running that you need to do. If we know which structures are involved in the safety/threat/trauma states of the body, then we can treat these structures to ensure that those involved in our safety state are in the best position to function optimally.
At this point, I will share some more detailed research into why this may be true. (If you’re not interested in anatomy & nervous system nerd talk, feel free to skip past this paragraph). Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and the director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University, has developed a theory about all this called Polyvagal Theory (PVT). He explains that PVT “describes the neural mechanisms through which physiological states communicate the experience of safety and contribute to an individual’s ability to either feel safe and spontaneously engage with others, or to feel threatened and recruit defensive strategies.” In simpler terms, PVT is a theory of how the NS and body work together in the perception of and responses to a person’s experience of safety or threat. He goes on to say that PVT “proposes that physiological state is a fundamental part, and not a correlate, of emotion and mood. The theory emphasizes a bidirectional link between brain and viscera, which would explain both how thoughts can change physiology, and how physiological state influences thought.” This means that there is a two-way street between our body & brain. NS regulation is not merely a matter of our brain directing our body. Our viscera (our organs) also “talk” to our brain to influence how we feel.
So, if your NS perceives that you are in danger and sends you into a sympathetic state, it will speed up your heart rate (among other things). But your heart beating faster can alone be enough to send signals up to your brain saying that you may not be safe. It goes both ways.
Osteopathic treatment works with the body, and can assist your body in helping the structures necessary for your safety state to function well are as healthy and unencumbered as possible. All this being said, for those seeking help with PTSD or C-PTSD, osteopathic treatment can be one piece in the process, and working with a therapist is another very important piece. In general, however, I believe that nurturing a healthy, regulated and resilient nervous system is a foundational aspect of healing. This is a key reason why I’d like to give you practical and actionable tips for things you can do to foster nervous system regulation.
Sources
Here are some great sources for more information about nervous system regulation
“The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication and Self-Regulation” by Stephen Porges (2011)
“The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” by Bessel van der Kolk (2014).
