Feeling Sympathetic?

I was reminded recently of the power and inertia of being stuck in a sympathetic nervous system response for too long. This is the "fight or flight" state where you are wound up and ready for action. Some would call this an anxiety state.

After a troublesome phone call I noticed my body shift into a sympathetic state, then continue to be there for far too long. Call it the power of emotions, or the lack of a body memory of what it feels like to be truly relaxed. How often do you purposefully induce a relaxed state? It was a good reminder for me to do exactly that.

An MD I visited with once hooked me up to a pulse and respiration monitoring device connected to software that showed me exactly where I was on the spectrum of sympathetic to parasympathetic (the relaxed state). It took several minutes of deep belly-breathing and reduced mental activity (some might call this meditation) to move the needle from sympathetic to parasympathetic, but I could attach a visual with the body experience and felt pretty darn relaxed. Then I started thinking of a recent stressor- and slipped right back into shallow breathing, mental noise, and the needle quickly shifted over to the sympathetic side of the spectrum.

This dynamic is similar to the Chinese medical concept of Yin and Yang. Yin is the parasympathetic and Yang is the sympathetic. In our culture many people forget how to relax and create down-time for themselves. So many of us keep way too busy, both in our activities and our minds. We easily become ungrounded and can tend to manic action without being rooted in ourselves.

Maintaining a balance between Yin and Yang is the key to good health. Too much of one without the other leads to imbalances that manifest as health problems sooner or later. Take a few minutes today to try this experiment out for yourself and see how you feel. If you like it, practice it a couple of times a day and try to stay conscious of not "over-doing it".

Exercise: Find a quiet place and dim the lights. Close your eyes and take deep, even breaths that make your tummy expand with each inhalation. Try to let go of thinking, finding the brief spaces in between your thoughts. Keep coming back to the breath if your mind wanders or your breathing becomes uneven. Do this for about 3-5 minutes.

Acupuncture also stimulates a rebalancing of Yin and Yang and some patients find it quite effective for stress management, anxiety and insomnia.