There are two ways that your nervous system plays a direct role in anxiety and depression. Your alerting, activating system, your autonomic nervous system, can get stuck on or stuck off. And most of the people who get stuck in these states, they don't realize it. They're trapped in these cycles, and they just feel chronically anxious or chronically exhausted. But the good news is that when you learn to identify what's happening, you can change it. [Music] According to polyvagal theory, there are three states of the nervous system. There's safety, also known as ventral vagal or the parasympathetic response. There's activation, which is also known as the sympathetic response or the fight/flight/freeze response. And there's the overwhelm or shutdown response, the immobilization response, which is also known as dorsal vagal which, confusingly, is also a parasympathetic response in your nervous system, but it's a more primitive state. So what does a healthy nervous system look like? You might think that if you're healthy you're calm all the time, but that's not the case. A healthy nervous system is adaptive and accurate. A person with a healthy nervous system probably spends much of their time feeling relaxed or safe, but when there's a real or immediate danger they can respond very quickly with a fight/flight/freeze response or even an immobilization response. They can take action and then restore their sense of safety quickly. So a healthy nervous system has a broad range of emotions. You can feel calm, love, activation, excitement, stress, right? But also joy and fun. You can get quite activated, even stressed, and take action - meaning that after a stressful event it could return to calm pretty quickly. With a healthy nervous system you're able to relax, sleep well. You're able to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. Your body can heal and repair and restore. If you're listening to this and you're feeling a sense of hopelessness, like this is an impossible goal, I just want to remind you your nervous system is like a muscle. When you learn to use it in the right way, when you exercise it in the right way, it can become healthy and strong. Your your nervous system is modifiable. It can learn, develop, change, and adapt. So if you're stuck in chronic stress, it's because your nervous system learned that. And if if it learned that, it can learn the other way too. Okay. So let's talk about how to do that. Our body has a really interesting feedback loop. Our brain, probably through a part of our brain called the insula, is constantly scanning your body to see how it's functioning, and it uses sensations to determine if the body's running all hunky dory or if there's a problem. So when your body's in pain or if something's not working right, it sends a message up to your brain that it's it's in danger. But when your body is calm or soft or relaxed, it sends a message from your body to your brain to chill out. And this is called a bottom-up approach to nervous system regulation. When we calm our body, we calm our mind. So what does an anxious nervous system look like? So one form of an unhealthy nervous system is called sympathetically dominant, or nervous system hyperarousal. It's when your fight/flight/freeze response is highly active. It's stuck on all the time. And the unfortunate thing is that anxiety makes us more sensitive to threats, so when we're anxious we actually get more anxious. So if you're stuck in the on mode you might feel like you're on high alert all the time. Uh you'll have a stronger reaction to threats, and that reaction might happen more quickly and to a higher level of stress. So this means that you're less accurate. You're more likely to interpret things as more dangerous than they are. You're you're more likely to take offense when none is intended or you're more likely to feel scared or stressed or overwhelmed even when you're safe, and you might feel more uh agitated or irritable. So when you're in the stuck on state you might feel jumpy, jittery, an upset stomach, or you might crave carbs. Um your heart and breathing's faster. You might feel the need to keep moving or stay busy or to overthink things, and you might also have a hard time concentrating, uh focusing, or remembering things. So this is, you know, it's like your nervous system is stuck in the on position all the time. You might have a hard time sleeping, relaxing, settling down, or playing, and you just might feel like you're on edge all the time, uh like you're always alert or always vigilant. So usually when people are sympathetically dominant, their alerting muscle is strong. Usually in this mode you're able to get stressed out and get get stuff done, but you might have a hard time having fun, or you feel anxious when you try to relax. So your nervous system isn't flexible. It's rigidly stuck in the on position. And this can be a result of trauma or chronic stress, but it can also just be a habit that we fall into. Um it could be caused by worrying too much or just simply not knowing how to self-regulate. And again, this is like a muscle, right? This part of your nervous system that gets activated has become like very strong. But the part of your nervous system, the parasympathetic response, that relaxes is weaker, so it has a harder time kind of overriding that fight/flight/freeze response. But like a muscle, what you exercise you strengthen. So you can rewire this um through a constant process of nervous system regulation. Uh you you can check in with your body multiple times a day, multiple times an hour. Remind yourself that you are safe, and then choose to consciously engage the parasympathetic response in your body. You are choosing to regulate your nervous system. And it might be through something like a slow breath or softening your gaze or whatever your favorite grounding skill is. Now, we're going to talk more about that, more about nervous system regulation in another video. But the main idea is when we're stuck in an on state we have a hard time turning on that parasympathetic response. Okay. The third state of anxiety in the nervous system is called nervous system hypoarousal. And this is when your body um turns on like this shut-down-and-conserve mode. It's it's when you're overwhelmed. So when you've experienced a threat that was too big or too much or too fast or too long or you've done it without support or resources, um when you're isolated and ashamed, your body might go into this protective mode called shutdown mode. And um again, this isn't your body body out to get you. You aren't broken. This state is actually a survival response. It's an attempt to conserve energy, um to avoid antagonizing an enemy, or to stay hidden. And this can be really functional in the short term. But when you get stuck in this mode, it's essentially a trauma response. Now, just to be clear, um getting stuck on, the hyperarousal mode is, also could be a trauma response. But um when we're stuck off, this can happen if you experience a huge tragedy or even simply if you're just worn down by chronic stress. In a huge event, shutting down is that last survival response. And with chronic stress you just get depleted. Like stress uses up energy, resources, nutrients. You spend a lot of time running and not enough time repairing and healing and resting, so your body gets worn down. So whether it's a short, intense event or a chronic stress, nervous system hypoarousal can look like burnout or depression. You may feel sluggish, tired, frozen, numb. Um you might have a slow metabolism, slow heartrate, breathing, low energy, low motivation. I mean, why try if everything's impossible and awful, right? You might have a hard time feeling pleasure or excitement. There's cognitive symptoms too. Uh so hypoarousal impairs creativity. People describe like a brain fog. Um it slows thinking. It seems to impair memory and concentration, and it's shown to uh contribute to poorer problem solving and uh difficulty initiating and completing tasks and also contributes to procrastination. This state of nervous system hypoarousal, does that sound like burnout to you? Does it sound like depression to you? Like it's crazy to me that no one is talking about the nervous system aspect of these condition. Chronic stress or severe stress or trauma can lead to these physical symptoms of high hypoarousal. If you're in this stuck off state, you might also experience like social withdrawal, uh decreased sexual desire, a lack of interest in hobbies or activities that you used to enjoy. Now, sometimes this does look like these quick bursts of energy or exertion, like you sprint and get something done and - like panicky action - and then you collapse into exhaustion. Just because you may be experiencing this uh nervous system hypoarousal, it doesn't mean that it's permanent. You can retrain your nervous system. Um treatment for this state I think requires maybe three steps. And the first one is self-care to restore physical resources or getting safe in the first place, right? But to restore these physical resources