Most people who are intimate with panic attacks probably know a thing or two about the fight/flight response. The fight/flight (and also, sometime freeze) response is the autonomic nervous system’s response to threat. It comes from the old, gnarly reptilian part of the brain that developed as our ancestors were being pursued by woolly, razor-toothed mammals and functions to mainline us with adrenalin so that we can get the heck out of Dodge.
In some case, panic attacks arise because the nervous system has muddled up being chased down by a scabrous predator with giving a Powerpoint keynote presentation to a roomful of suits. How this came to be is the subject of another post but suffice it to say, it owes a debt to early and ongoing trauma.
The autonomic nervous system has 2 branches; the sympathetic, which launches the fight/flight response, and the parasympathetic, which does the opposite and is sometimes referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ system. Chronically stressed folks spend a lot of time hanging out in the sympathetic branch until it becomes a default setting and that is not pretty.
How to reverse this? Well, the more you can rouse the parasympathetic branch to activity, the more it will muscle in, and crowd out, the function of the sympathetic nervous system.
And the key to this something called the vagus nerve – the queen of the nervous system.
Now, it turns out that what happens in vagus, doesn’t stay in vagus. Stimulating the vagus nerve sends the body a signal of safety by rousing the parasympathetic nervous system to action and thereby de-activating the increased heart rate, sweating, and racing thoughts associated with the sympathetic nervous system.
Because it’s like a muscle, the vagus can be worked on and toned which, in turn helps to improve over all well being by balancing the two branches of the autonomic nervous system.
There are a heap of ways you can tone the vagus, to wit:
- breathing exercises
- singing
- chanting
- sex
- improving gut health with pro-biotics because weirdly, not only does your brain talk to your gut (think diarrhoea before a job interview – unless that’s just me ), the health of your gut gets communicated to your brain, affecting your mood.
But I decided to go for the jugular, a practice that fills me with fear and dread.
Freezing cold showers.
And my reaction to cold showers revealed the mother lode, the source of my stuckness.
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