Stress Responses, The Role of the Nervous System and Its Effect on Depression

Live Holistically is a multi-author site.
This post was written by: Susan Blue

Taking Emotional Temperature

Psychic testing of the emotional temperature of a room full of people or an individual is one of the specialties of our nervous system. Emotional safety is an arena that our nervous system is keenly tuned to. It is the gut feelings, or as some say, the brain in the gut.

• Who can we let our guard down and be O.K. with our vulnerability?
• Who is pretty neutral for us to be around?
• Who can we never show our backs to?

Being safe with how we feel is part of the emotional currents that underlie our lives. It is a large portion of our boundary structure; ability to interact and connect with an individual, family groups and society.

The Role of the Enteric Nervous System

As infants we gazed into the eyes of our mother, father and family members. Their presence and actions are impressed in our nervous systems, for good and for worse. The enteric nervous system is primary for feeling that we belong and have a sense of place in family and community. It is this part of the nervous system that creates the feeling of bonding, connection and belonging. From this beginning we develop the basis for familial and social interaction.

Instinctual Messages

Sensory or body felt messages tell us about our environment and those who populate it. These messages are from our back brain. These messages are instinctual, body felt, may have color or smell, and can include a little movie vignette running through our mind.

These include the nice feelings that come in anticipating the arrival of a favorite friend or relative. The uptight meeting with the boss may simply be facing the unknown. For those who have supervisors that have made themselves emotionally distressful, there may be a large variety of negative body feelings.

Messages become Impulses

Our frontal cortex or front brain, will make sense, create a story, or link the present happening to some past experience.

It will also over ride the impulse to get away, turn our backs, run off, or slide quietly out the side door. All of which are the hind brain’s impulses to flee, fly, run. The impulse to shove, push, turn red in the face and engage in battle is the fight response impulse.

Many of the fight or flight impulses are overridden because of our innate sense of making a situation worse, or that we have other skills to handle the situation. Ta da and good for us! But did our nervous system get it?

When Impulses Stay in the Nervous System

It takes a little time for our bodies to re-adjust from an intense situation. It can happen more quickly if:

• We can be present with ourselves and our body felt sensations.
• Naming the sensations. This creates resonance in our whole system; it is the yes, that is it, that’s right.
• Then waiting to see what happens next in our bodies.
• There can be several of these steps to the down loading of the nervous system to a more neutral, or I am O.K. now place.

When we have to go on to the next thing and not have time to debrief, those impulses and the behavior that overrode them at the time don’t get recognized by your nervous system as the resource / resources of the moment. Often the front brain gets involved and the giving meaning to, or the story is on…. Justification, rationalisation take front and center stage. That fabulous intellect is analysing what had happened, but without results for the whole of us to settle.

The layering of overridden impulses become stress factors imploding the nervous system. When we are children, we will cry and not know why, run around hitting, screaming and seem out of control. Because the brain is still in development, the letting down of the nervous system is immediate. As we become older children, we can navigate the discharge somewhat better and will then feel the familial and social pressure of deemed acceptable behavior. We as children begin to loose our naturalness and become a bit stiff.

Long Term Effects of a Suppressed Nervous System

The same happens for us as adults. But for many of us, we all ready have a back log of suppressed impulses held within our nervous system. Often we wounder what happened to us? Where did our liveliness, creativity go? We no longer notice the beauty or changes in our environment. We are no longer orienting to our surroundings. Our sense of self is closed in and so is our seeing and hearing.

We can see the outward manifestation of an overloaded nervous system by posture, movement, ability to be present and to focus the mind in others. Can we see it in ourselves?

Regaining Resiliency within the Nervous System

Ann Wiesel Cornell’s book, “The Power of Focusing,” restates the being present, following sensations, sensing what happens next in a format that anyone can follow to down load their nervous system and regain their resilience.

There are other author and books, as well as websites that can be useful for down loading the nervous system and bringing the resourcefulness of a resilience nervous system back into place. Click here to begin your exploration.

If in the process you find you are in an internal area that you cannot facilitate yourself, Get Help! Just the recognition of needing out side help will get your nervous system to change. Taking steps to get the help you need will change the function and resiliency of your nervous system for the better.

Remember, no one gave us a road map for how to get where we get in life. There is no fault to be where you are. It is a happening that was given a meaning that you can re-frame.