The connection between the nervous system and your mental health (feat Derek the tortoise)
The connection between the nervous system and your mental health: how supporting your nervous system can help you to manage stress, depression and anxiety
Your nervous system, also known as the autonomic nervous system, is what links your brain to the rest of your body. Your nervous system sends signals to your brain to tell it what’s happening in your body and in return the brain sends signals back to the body through the nervous system to keep your body running smoothly. That sounds pretty simple, but we can think of our nervous system as a pretty sophisticated computer and just like a computer its function can be impacted by a whole load of different factors.
If your nervous system falls out of balance your ability to regulate yourself can be affected. Just like your computer if it gets a bug or a virus. This is known as ‘dysregulation’ and it can affect all kinds of different things, including your mental health.
If this isn’t a tortoise don’t come for me. It’s just a metaphor.
What if your nervous system was a tortoise? Called Derek.
Derek the tortoise is a great metaphor for your nervous system. Derek moves steadily through the world, chomping the odd leaf here and there. Just like our nervous system, Derek is constantly monitoring the environment. Partly to find juicy leaves but also to be aware of threats.
When Derek encounters a threat they retract into their shell. This is a defensive mechanism that protects Derek from harm, in the same way our nervous system keeps us safe when our brain perceives danger. The nervous system equivalent is to go into a ‘fight-or-flight’ or a ‘shut down’ response.
Derek the hypervigilent tortoise
After their experience with the predator, Derek starts to look around more, and they’re more sensitive to potential threats in the environment. This is similar to the nervous system becoming more sensitive when it's subjected to ongoing stress and when we’re experiencing mental health struggles. This can disproportionately affect neurodivergent people, because of our sensitivity to sensory stimulation.
The part of our brain that manages our defensive responses, like fight-or-flight, can’t tell the difference between real threat and perceived threat. This is like Derek seeing a dark shape and retreating into their shell, but the dark shape is actually just a tree trunk. DerekMs brain has misinterpreted the danger as a way to keep them safe. In the same way, our nervous system’s response to perceived threats can leave us feeling anxious, stressed or low, even when there is no real danger.
Read more about this in my latest blog post. I’ll also be talking about each of these responses, along with strategies to manage them, at my online Stress and Mental Health workshop.
Ok, but can you explain the nervous system in more detail? Maybe without the tortoise stuff?
Less tortoise? Poor Derek. But here we go.
The nervous system is a complex collection of nerves, cells and tissues that work together to control your body. It's responsible for regulating all the things you do automatically, like breathing or digesting food.
It's also what allows you to feel emotions. Your brain sends signals through the nervous system when something makes you happy or sad. This can be anything from eating an ice-cream on a hot day (nice!) to getting into a disagreement with someone close to you (not so nice).
The link between mental health struggles like depression and anxiety and the way that our nervous systems works isn't always obvious at first glance, but when we understand how this connection works we can implement approaches that can help us to manage our mental health struggles and respond when our nervous system becomes dysregulated.
Your nervous system and the here and now
An important step in learning to manage our mental health is learning how to be more connected with the present moment. When we’re experiencing anxiety or depression we can find ourselves ruminating about the past and/or panicking about the future. These feelings and sensations can be directly linked to our nervous system; depression is a state of nervous system shut-down and anxiety is your nervous system going into a fight-or-flight response.
When you're feeling overwhelmed by these feelings it can help to bring your focus back into the here and now. There are lots of different ways to do this and different approaches suit different people. From breathing techniques, to specific forms of meditation and movement, there is a whole load off scientific evidence that shows these tools directly impact the nervous system and help to bring your body back into a more regulated state. I share strategies to manage your nervous system, as well as talking more about how your nervous system works at my online Stress and Mental Health workshop.
Resources to support your nervous system and mental health
I hope you’ve found this post about your nervous system useful. I’m sharing links below to some resources to support your mental health and your nervous system. As well as my paid content, like my upcoming workshop where I’ll cover this in more detail, you’ll find free resources too. If you’re in crisis head here where you’ll find links to places you can contact in an emergency.
Book my stress and mental health workshop
Buy a professionally recorded sound bath meditation to support deep relaxation
A free Loving Kindness meditation to cultivate compassion
My blog post about simple ways to be more resilient
