Accessing the Parasympathetic Nervous System without Focusing on Breath!
In this episode I break down the various parts of the anatomy and physiology of the parasympethic nervous system.
Understanding these parts provides insight on how simple things can help shift into improved parasympathetic tone and robustness of the autonomic nervous system.
I provide easy approaches that are often more powerful or accessible than using breathing exercises alone.
Resources mentioned:
Coach Allison Tenney and The Den program: https://allisontenneyfitness.com/
IG post inspired by this episode background: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzEY5tUL5Sf/
Trigeminal Nerve podcast episode: https://www.movementrev.com/podcast/season-1-episode-28-the-power-of-the-trigeminal-nerve
Robert Schliep article: https://www.blackroll.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Schleip_Interoception.pdf
Polyvagal Theory / Stephen Porges: https://integratedlistening.com/podcast/being-well-podcast-polyvagal-theory-with-stephen-porges/
Physiological Sigh: https://youtu.be/rBdhqBGqiMc
Regen Library: https://www.movementrev.com/regen
Nervous System Reset Individual Regen Session: https://www.movementrev.com/regen-sessions-store/p/hr53h87d368ifoc5r38iy5xtmbptk2
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Hey there and welcome. I'm Anna Hartman and this is Unreal Results, a podcast where I help you get better outcomes and gain the confidence that you can help anyone, even the most complex cases. Join me as I teach about the influence of the visceral organs and the nervous system on movement, pain, and injuries, all while shifting the paradigm of what whole body assessment and treatment really looks like.
I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
Anna Hartman: Hello, hello, welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results Podcast. Um, here we are, another week. I promised this week would be about the parasympathetic nervous system, so I am prepared to deliver on that information. Um, Yeah, the you know, the lighting's weird. It's that time of year where it's getting lighter earlier And uh the room i'm in is like more of an eastern exposure.
So this time of day is tough I am going to scoot over a little bit so the lighting's better Please pause
Alright, that seems better. So, um, yeah. Where am I at? I'm at home, which is nice. I'm starting to have more days home than I have in a while, which is really good to sort of settle in and catch up with life here in San Diego. Um, still traveling a lot, but just for shorter chunks. Um, which, Has its benefits and has its not benefits It's a little bit more tiring in a sense But also there's something that feels better about being in my own home more often Um, I even worked out for the first time today in a million years Well, it feels like a million years, but it was probably just since the summer, um, which is probably longer than it should be, but here we are nonetheless.
Um, I'm not looking forward to the delayed onset muscle soreness I am sure to be having in the next 48 hours. Um, but those sometimes are things you cannot avoid. I am happy to be back in the den with Alison Tenney, so I may have talked about her on the podcast. I love her programming, love her business.
She is a great coach and, um, so started back day one, day one, month one, year one. Um, and I actually, on that note too, just to share a little bit before we dive into the podcast, um, I was really pleasantly surprised at how my body felt actually doing squats today. Usually squats may, like, Don't feel good on my knee and um, it made me actually realize a couple things Uh one my knee's been feeling really good um Lately, and that says a lot, and um, I can't quite, I don't even know 100 percent why, but I'm gonna say since I haven't done much, um, it must be from the soulliest exercises that I added into my life, um.
In the last few months, and, um, that, that makes me happy, and, um, also, it just also goes to show you that the gains you make in a strength and conditioning program, even when you stop and have a long time off, a lot of the gains still stick around, and that is a lot of the Actually really cool. Um, I felt strong.
Um, like I said, my knee felt good. My ankle mobility actually probably felt better than it has in a long time. And, um, part of the reason I was a little bit dreading, like, starting back up with the strength and conditioning program, again, a little bit because of the soreness, but because I had this feeling like, oh, I'm going to have to start at the beginning again.
And, um, That everything I had done, uh, the last sort of few years, you know, was lost, and it's nice. It's nice to see that it's not, um, still feeling pretty strong. Uh, of course, not as strong as I was when I was lifting, but, um, not as weak as I thought I had lost, so. Anyways, I'm stoked to be doing that again.
It's not any other reason other than I felt like, I don't know, I was just kind of like pulled to start lifting weights again. Which is important, you know, this is like, I did a whole podcast on listening to your body and um, I just sometimes get sick of weightlifting. It's never been one of my favorite things in the world.
Um, but, and then every once in a while I just feel like I want to go back. And the nice thing is this time around, just in general, wanting to exercise and move my body and strength train a little bit more, it's actually just coming from a place of, like, I felt like doing it. I felt... Like, called to do it and do some strength stuff.
Versus feeling like I wanted to do it for body composition changes only. I'm really doing it just because I wanted to and because I know it's good to support overall health and hormone function. Um, which I will openly admit that is the first time I'm, I'm really going into a strength and conditioning program without the overarching goal being to lose weight.
Um, and that also just feels really nice energy around it all. Um, so I'm looking forward to that journey again. Um, this episode, like I said, is about the parasympathetic nervous system and why I wanted to talk about it is for a couple of reasons. One, because I think people talk about the nervous system a lot, which is great.
Um, and they talk about down regulating the nervous system a lot and you know, the power of the vagus nerve and. The power of breathing exercises in, uh, switching nervous system states, and I also feel like there is a little bit of a lack of understanding around the nervous system and also the other things you could do that make a huge difference to your parasympathetic nervous system, to your sympathetic nervous system, and to your overall resilience of the whole thing together.
And so I wanted to share that, um, because I think, you know, people are like, oh, I do the breathing, breathing exercises. And I think another thing too, and, and sort of how I presented it when I shared this information on Instagram a couple weeks ago, which I'll link, I'll link this. specific Instagram post.
It's a carousel post in the show notes. So you can have access to this all kind of written out. Um, and actually if you're on my email list, you probably already got it, but, um, it was basically the, the emphasis on that we needed as healthcare providers. We need to stop telling people, telling patients, telling, Athletes telling whoever that they need to decrease their stress, right?
That they, that stress is something to remove from their life. And that might seem like a funny thing to say, but in a, in a society that is notoriously stressed out, um, and like caught up in this like busy, patriarchal, like masculine energy of constantly being busy and constantly doing and constantly producing and adding to our plates.
And also in a world where there's war and in a world where there's freaking expensive, right? So I think a lot of us probably have a lot of financial stress and there's, you know, there's just like a lot of stress. And it's actually this concept of understanding that stress is actually not the bad guy.
Stress is not. The thing that we need to remove. May it be helpful to decrease some of the load in our life that creates stress? Absolutely. But is it always possible? No. And is it needed in order to actually have a better resilience of our nervous system and feel better in our body? No. Actually, it's not, not required.
at all, the way our nervous system works. And this is, I think, is the most like pro profound thing to understand, is that we can Be under a lot of stress, but not let it affect us adversely as long as we have feelings of safety that are stimulating or facilitating our parasympathetic nervous system. So it's not the removal of threat.
And also oftentimes you can remove the threat, you can remove the stress, and it doesn't change the nervous system. Because the problem is that we're under rested and we're under. regulated in terms of our parasympathetic nervous system, we don't get enough messages of rest and restoration and safety and that kind of thing.
Right. And that's sort of what is mucks up the system because it is the parasympathetic nervous system that actually checks. Right? That applies a break to the sympathetic nervous system. Fundamentally, we are wired for survival. That is like our oldest, most primitive nervous system is this survival mode.
Um, this is actually too why, um, When babies are born, part of the reason why their heart rate is so much higher is because they have not had this co regulation with the parent yet to start applying the vagal break to their heart rate, right? So, one of the things that brings our heart rate down is this feeling of safety and this feeling of rest.
This feeling of, um, Yeah, being safe. At the end of the day, that's what it all comes down to. And so you'll hear me talking about being safe a lot and talking about how safety influences the parasympathetic nervous system. And I think that's a little bit of what gets confusing to people and If I'm being honest, before I understood polyvagal theory, or at least the concepts presented in polyvagal theory, I looked at the parasympathetic nervous system in a more, like, anatomical way than an actual physiological way.
So, um, if we think about it, And actually, this is the one time I'm going to pull out some notes here. Um, the three parts, there's three parts of the parasympathetic nervous system. There's the parasympathetic nerves that are found in the cranial nerves, so in the brain stem, as well as the, um, pelvic spelanchnic nerves, which are part of the sacral plexus.
These nerve roots, these, these cranial nerves, and their, their target organs, Right? So the organs that these nerves go to provide or give us a sense of interoception, neuroception, and proprioception. Interoception is this awareness of how we're feeling on the inside. So this is the messages from our organs.
And the messages from our organs are usually relayed via chemical, so chemoreceptors, chemical, or mechanoreceptors. Mechanoreceptors, of a lot of our organs, have to do with things like pressure, temperature, movement, I mean the same, same sort of mechanoreceptors that we find in muscles and joints too. But organs especially are like very rich in pressure mechanoreceptors.
Which makes sense because our organs live with inside different cavities and each cavity has a certain pressure about them, right? So we've got specifically the nerves, the cranial nerves that are parasympathetic nerves have these parasympathetic ganglia, um, are cranial nerve 3, cranial nerve 7, cranial nerve 9, and cranial nerve 10.
So cranial nerve 10 is the most famous of them all, the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve actually goes, um, outside of the cranium, acts outside of the cranium, down into the gut, though it doesn't innervate all of the gut. It innervates the thoracic organs. The abdominal organs all the way into the lower one third of the digestive tract.
The lower one third of the digestive tract, so the descending colon, the sigmoid colon, and the rectum. Um, that part is innervated actually by the pelvis blank neck nerves. So, um,
cranial nerve nine. is the Glossopharyngeal nerve, so this is a nerve that goes to the trachea, to the larynx, and pharynx, so it has a lot to do with our vocalization, um, sound, um, and then cranial nerve 7. is the facial nerve and facial nerve obviously has a lot to do with our expressions and then cranial nerve number three is the ocular motor nerve.
So ocular motor nerve, um, does motor function of, um, medial medial movement of the eyeball, so convergence, and also specifically the parasympathetic part controlled by the ciliary, ciliary, ganglia, ciliary nerve, and it, um, is the, our pupils dilating and constricting. So, interestingly enough, of those parasympathetic nerves, I didn't say the trigeminal nerve.
And you're like, Anna, but wait, what about trigeminal nerve? Because I've already, I've done a whole podcast on how powerful the trigeminal nerve is. Part of the reason Why it's powerful, though, is because these parasympathetic nerves, um, of cranial nerve 3, 7, and 9, they actually all act through branches of the trigeminal nerve.
So that's interesting, right? So, um, these other cranial nerves, anastomose, are joined up with branches of the trigeminal nerve for their parasympathetic function, which is why trigeminal nerve, though it's not a parasympathetic nerve. can often have parasympathetic effects when we're doing trigeminal nerve manual therapy or trigeminal nerve glide or you know, skin stimulation, those kind of things.
So that's sort of a fun fact. Those cranial nerves all, except for the vagus nerve, act within the face or the neck.
Now, the other part of the parasympathetic nervous system is the cortex, right? So, the brainstem, really, all parts of the body, um, talk to the cortex, and specifically the areas of the hypothalamus and the limbic systems, because these are areas of the brain, areas of the cortex, that are driven by feelings of safety.
So this is how emotions... Also, add to the interoceptive, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive information going to influence our limbic system and our hypothalamus. In fact, this is one of the ways that animals, not just humans, but animals, um, create co regulation with each other. And it's this idea of light touch, so interoceptive touch is a term that Robert Schleip used to describe it, um, in an article because, uh, that he was talking about the free nerve endings in the fascia.
These are specifically, these free nerve endings specifically are these interoceptive. Light touch fibers that go directly into the insular, um, cortex of the limbic system and, um, influence your overall feelings of well being and safety. So these free nerve endings are throughout our body, throughout our fascia, um, connected to our skin.
And especially rich. In areas, uh, like our soft, hairy parts. So, um, you know, um, think about like the fine baby hairs on our body or even the intimate parts of our body that are, um, hairy. But it, it, uh, again, in animals it's very linked to grooming practices, and this is a very, like, um, soothing thing, right?
So this light touch is, is, is a very... Parasympathetic relaxing thing and this was actually one of the things when I learned it I was like this makes so much sense because as a kid, I loved it when my mom tickled me That was like me and my sister's like favorite thing in the world was having our mom tickle us like all over Arms, legs, back, head, like face was the best.
Makes sense because a lot of the other parasympathetic nerves are stimulating the skin or aspects or connections to the stimulation of the skin through the trigeminal nerve. And, um, and it was just so relaxing and so soothing and it instantly made us feel safe. And usually that interoceptive touch is usually also involved, um, when you're cuddling with someone or like snuggling with them.
It's also interesting because it's something that My athletes back in the day would, like, make fun of me, but also love about me, is when I would see them, I would, like, lightly, like, pet their shoulder or their back, right? Like, one of the baseball players once upon a time. Uh, shout out Brian Roberts, um, he, he's, he autographed a baseball card for me and he wrote it to Anna, the best light pedder out there.
And I was like, this could be, um, construed in the wrong way, but, um, he, it was like, he was like, Oh, it just feels so good when I come into the treatment area and you do that. And he's like, it's just like the best. Um. And so again, once I learned about this interoceptive like touch, I was like, Hmm, no wonder he liked it.
No wonder it was the way I created connection and built rapport and like created a safe environment with my.
And, um, so it makes sense. So this goes directly to a specific area of the brain related to our safety, our, are we safe? Are we, um, in threat or not? This is the area of the brain, too, where I said emotions influence it. So I often think. What people really mean when they say you need to decrease your stress.
Oftentimes, a lot of the stress we have are based on thoughts that we're having, worrying or ruminating about. Um, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. Um, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about, um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Made up, right? We're worrying about things that are in the future, things that haven't happened.
That's made up and when we can recognize that and sort of let them go or Remind ourselves that in this moment in this in this moment We are safe and there's you know, as long as you are safe, right if we can change the emotion We can quote unquote remove the stress if that makes sense. So oftentimes I think this emotional piece is What people are sort of getting at, but don't understand necessarily how to articulate.
That's the stress people are actually experiencing versus actual physical, um, stress. But, then, the other part of the nervous system, and I already sort of talked about it a little bit, is in the peripheral nervous sy Uh, uh, the other part of the parasympathetic nervous system is in the peripheral nervous system.
I already talked about it, the pelvic splanchnic nerves. These are from the nerve roots of S2 through S4. And they are, uh, and then go to the associated organs, which I already mentioned, as well as some of the, uh, your genital organs, in addition to the digestive organs. And they also, um, relay information regarding interoception and proprioception, right?
So, um, those are the three parts of the parasympathetic nervous system. Now understanding these three parts of the parasympathetic nervous system, now we can have a better idea in applying interventions. Applying tasks, interventions, or what's another word for it, strategies to facilitate the parasympathetic nervous system because this is what we want to spend the time doing.
And this is the other kind of mind shift. Often times when we look at helping somebody, we think about what we need to take away from them. And nobody likes that feeling. Nobody likes to have to feel like they have to give something up or drop something or have something taken away from them in order to feel better.
So in this sense, you're actually providing strategies of things that people can add to their life instead of subtract from their life that can actually make you feel, feel less stressed without removing the actual stressors. And that, at the end of the day, is what we all want, right? Because most of us want to be, like, highly productive, driven, like, successful people doing a lot of things.
We don't want to have to stop doing that stuff in, in especially our, often our busyness and like our stressors of, are actually who we also identify. And then also part of it is our stressors are things that sometimes we cannot remove, right? People who have kids, kids are a huge stress. Family in general is a stress to us.
We can't eliminate that, right? And so, um, it's nice to know that we can actually then. Add things into our life that make us feel less stressed and give us the physiological health benefits of having a resilient nervous system. The physiological health benefits of a resilient nervous system usually means we are less likely to be in pain, right?
Our pain threshold actually increases, right? Meaning we can, we don't feel it and our mobility improves and our chances of getting sick. And we don't feel the symptoms of our autonomic nervous system organs being reactive. So often times if we're feeling heartburn or um, gas or lightheaded or dizzy or headaches or, right, like all of these symptoms that happen with our body is actually a reactive autonomic nervous system.
Ideally, we shouldn't feel anything from our organs. They should just be running in the background without us having to be aware of them. The symptoms are when we're actually having, um, sensations of these autonomic nervous system reactions. Right? So this is an indication that the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are not communicating with very, very well to regulate or, um, dial in the function of these organs, which then creates these symptoms.
Okay? So, um, Some of the things, the, some of the easy ways that we can then add into our practice, add into our life. These strategies to easily stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system is one, understanding this role of the connection to the cranial nerves and the feelings of, um, being safe. In engaging socially with others because this is how humans, um, create safety is, is through community.
And part of that is the stimulation of these nerves through talking, right? This is the cranial nerve number nine. So you can stimulate that easily by humming. Singing, chanting, um, those are all great ways to facilitate this. This is sometimes why, um, church, um, can be so, um, helpful for people. Not, not, not necessarily even the religion piece.
That's like a whole nother animal, but just simply gathering in community and then vocalizing with each other. The singing is. It's very helpful to the nervous system. Going to a concert. Same thing, right? Like, there's nothing better than going to a concert and then having the singer have the crowd sing and as corny as it is, and as terrible as it is, because you didn't go there to pay to hear everybody and their brother sing, right?
You went there to hear the person sing. It's actually one of the best feelings about being at a live concert and that is because of this collective, like, tuning. Not to, no pun intended, but also pun intended, this tuning of our autonomic nervous system. Yoga classes where you do chanting, ketones, this is why it's so powerful is we are one, doing it within community, and then two, we're stimulating our cranial nerve number nine, which is a parasympathetic nerve.
Some other easy things is the hair pull, the face massage, ear massages. This is going to get facial nerves. Trigeminal nerve branches, um, upper cervical nerve that connects to trigeminal nerve. This also is going to have a reflexive, um, connection to the accessory nerve, um, which even though it's not a parasympathetic nerve, it shares a connection with cranial nerve 9, which is, as well as it's considered one of the nerves of social engagement because it's shoulder shrugging is part of our facial expression, right?
So it works with cranial nerve 7, facial nerves quite a bit. You can even do that, cranial nerve 7, you can like, squeeze your eyes real tight, open them real wide, make different faces with your, um, mouth, you can do tongue exercises, you can tongue mobility, all the things, all of those things instantly connects us into our parasympathetic nervous system.
And mention, and just to mention, I'm talking about all these things that we can do before we even layer on breathing. And in fact, sometimes I think these things are more effective to shift us into a parasympathetic nervous system than our breath. Because our breath, our breath is such a unique thing.
Thing because it is sub unconscious and conscious, right? Or subconscious and conscious And, um, we have control of it, but it's autonomic, it's working, it's doing it on itself. It's an output, it's a movement, right? The quality of it can change based on inputs, right? So it is, it is still an output. And so sometimes, I, as I've learned more about the nervous system, I've actually...
I've already gotten away from using breathing exercises to facilitate the nervous system because to me, it is kind of like exercise in a way of like, if I'm over queuing an exercise, if I'm trying to manipulate the output, I've already lost the game because the brain The, the organism, the brain is not going to remember that and keep it as the new motor output pattern because it didn't happen reflexively.
It didn't happen on its own organization, right? It required too many cognitive skills. steps in order to become autonomic or automatic. And so I actually look to do these other things and then notice how the breath changes in response. And when I see the breath change in response to a breath pattern that mimics what happens when we're in a more relaxed parasympathetic state, then I know I've actually shifted things.
And I, I think to, um, If you follow the world with Andrew Huberman, boy, he blew up fast. If you follow his work and what he talks about, you know, at the end of the day, the most documented research breathing protocol that does shift state is actually not box breathing, not extended exhales, like not any of the stuff that we normally prescribe, but it's just a physiological sigh, which is a reflexive thing that's happening in our physiology and actually trying to mimic something that happens as we shift gears.
So it's still even doing the Motor output, but it's tinkering with the physiology in a very specific way. So if I do give a breathing exercise out, it's the physiological sigh, and that's about it. These days. So, um, some of the other things that we can do. Um, dealing with our feelings. I talked about a little bit feelings and emotions that you cannot discount the powerful effect that the cortex, the hypothalamus and the limbic system have on our autonomic nervous system and the influence because of this connection to safety.
And so, you know, giving space for your feelings, talking. There's, again, the cranial nerve 9 part of it too, right? More bang for your buck. Journaling. Meditating. Going to therapy. Whatever. There's various forms of therapy. It doesn't always have to be talk therapy. I loved EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Um, and, um, increasing safety via social engagement, which is what I'm talking about, right? So, and this is just being with someone that... You feel comfortable with and talking and showing facial expressions and and ideally it's with another well regulated person, right? If I'm socially engaging with somebody who's stressed out, um, that's harder.
It's going to be harder for me to get something out of that. Um, So, you know, the type of people that you're in relations with or in social engagement with does matter. The cool thing about the internet is, um, we can actually get these feelings of social engagement, these positive feelings of social engagement via Zoom calls, as long as we can see the person.
That is key. Um, hearing them, talking on the phone is good, but it's not quite as powerful as being able to see the person's facial expressions. Being able to see the facial expressions is a very important part of this, um, connection. Makes sense though, right? Because we know facial nerve, cranial nerve number seven, seven is one of the parasympathetic nerves.
Um, and then my biggest thing is improving safety, um, in general in our body via improving body awareness and body ownership, and you can do this through movement, which is so wonderful. You can do this through self massage, um, then you get the added bonus of the interoceptive, um, free nerve, sensory, free...
nerve endings in the fascia, which is wonderful. Uh, you can do cerebellar drills. You can do, um, rock mats, barefoot walking, grounding is a really good way to do this. These are all exteroceptive ways. And this exteroceptive information goes up into the brain and it goes into these, this area of. both cerebellum, and the cortex and gives us better information.
And the better information we have about where we are in space, our proprioception, and the more we feel like we have control over our body, the safer we feel and our output changes. So, so many things in that sense, um, that we can do. One of the movements that I think is not utilized It's as much as it should be.
It's utilized in young, in babies quite a bit, but in adults we forget we have access to it. It's actually like the rocking motion and the like oscillating motion that you would do with a baby who's upset, right? If a baby's crying, you pick it up and you start walking with it or you sort of gently bounce it up and down.
This oscillating movement and this movement in general can be very relaxing to the nervous system, more than likely because of a pumping action to the seborrheal spinal fluid. But you could also argue that some of this oscillating is just moving our organs gently in its cavities and any organ movement facilitates this parasympathetic response to via the vagus nerve and the pelvic spine connect nerves.
So, um. These are all wonderful, wonderful movement type things. Um. That improves safety, improves body awareness, um, which can help our feelings, right? Because I'd say, most of the time, when our feelings are not, When it comes to the nervous system, it's usually like dealing with feelings of not feeling safe.
Um, and what that might be for you is different. For me, it's like, you know, underlying like worry about being alone, which I think fundamentally is kind of human, but just to throw it out there. Um, and then another thing that you can do, which I sort of mentioned with the breathing is controlling your pace of breathing and your heart rate.
But like I said, the best form seems to be the physiological sigh. I think I have a video of it. I will link it in the show notes. Um. But, uh, you know, the other things you can do is like a six, a six beat breath to, um, connect your, uh, respiratory rate and your heart rate to some, like, um, heart coherence. So there's a company called HeartMath that is big on that.
Um. Um, even just doing interoceptive things like, um, putting your finger, your thumb and your index feeling finger lightly together and feeling your pulse in trying to sort of like count your pulse rate that sort of usually brings the heart into coherence as well. So there's a lot of ways that actually are not one, just breathing and two, removing the stress at no point.
Do we need need to actually remove the stress? That's actually what makes humans like so unique and so amazing is that we can deal with a lot of stress and still be very resilient and keep going. But the key to that is doing An ample amount of things that speak directly to our parasympathetic nervous system, right?
So the next patient, the next athlete, whoever, or even yourself, the next time you think that you need to decrease your stress, flip the switch and think, actually, I need to increase my rest and increase my safety. And how can I do that? And often, too, it starts with... Having a second to think about, like, what it feels like in your body to be safe.
That is a journal question I ask people when they go through my mentorship program. Is I think people haven't really thought about it in a long time. It's like, shoot, what does it feel like? What does safety feel like in my body? Because once you feel, once you can identify what it feels like in your body, you're going to recognize more.
Readily, when your body doesn't feel like it, which is the sign that you need to spend some time finding it again. And then you can figure out what you need for yourself to feel the safest. Each one of the things I provided you, depending on your past experiences in life, your past injuries, your past traumas, your past relationships, your past whatever's, Some of the things I mentioned might not feel safe to you like they do to me.
And that also is the beautiful thing that there's a lot to pick from and it's very individual and it has to It has to have that feeling of safety with it. And so, also understanding that if you have a hard time feeling safe, that there's a lot of things that you can target by understanding and knowing the anatomy that are going to help you get there.
And that sometimes is the beginning of a long journey of healing your body. So, that's a lot, right? So last week when I sat down to do this, I did not have like the mental capacity to talk about it because I was not well rested. So I had, you know, some time at home. I got in the ocean. I took some beach walks.
I sat outside. Like I did all the things that I know that I need in order to quickly make me feel safe and grounded and rested. And then I could show up and make more sense of such a complex
So I hope that's helpful for you, I hope that gives you a new perspective on stress, and um, that stress is not necessarily the problem, um, we can only do so much with eliminating stress, and um, but, well, and this, I'll leave you with these parting thoughts, I think. When somebody is told by a health care professional that they're, that they don't feel good because of stress, it is one of those things that when somebody says it's just like you stop listening to them because it's like I've heard this over and over again and I've tried to make changes in my life and it doesn't change and so it's like and again, too, it's almost blaming the patient for their problem.
Like this is your fault. You're over stressed. And we gotta get out of the habit of doing that because it totally turns people off from being able to help themselves because they think it's It's something that they can't help because, like I said, sometimes we cannot remove the stresses. So, actually, when you frame it as, you know what, there's a lot we can do to help you, and it's actually all these things that facilitate rest and facilitate safety, and this is why it's connected to stress, and you don't have to, you know, you don't have to feel like this is your fault.
But here's all the things that you can do to help yourself. Like that has a whole different energy around it, around helping yourself. Cause most people too, when they're told that they need to rest, they don't really know how to rest. They don't know what is rest and what is not rest. In fact, that is the whole reason I created the region library and the region sessions is because my athletes.
We're doing their regen day, which is supposed to be a rest day, and they were just doing a light workout, which is still not rest. They were never giving messages to their nervous system that it was time to rest. And so each one of my regen sessions combines, or not combines, each one of my regen sessions contains one of these many things that I told you that we can do to facilitate the parasympathetic nervous system response.
And it's that simple to start a regen session, a movement session with like stuff around our head and neck or on our pelvic floor or with the physiological side and then move in through movement. It is a whole different experience. And then I bookend it with that stuff again. So I give the message at the beginning of the session, we're resting, but then we do some movements, which are sometimes not.
feeling restful, and so then I end it with some restful information. So I am properly telling the nervous system, it is time to relax. This is rest. You should feel safe. And I say should because you, that is a very personal thing. You can create the most wonderful space and think you're a safe space for someone and if they don't feel safe, it's not safe.
And so that's the other thing too is just don't assume that the patient, that the person feels safe. That's something that they need to recognize and help facilitate on their own. You can only do so much to get them there.
That's my mic drop. That's it. Let's flip the, flip the scenario, right? Stop blaming the patient saying they're overstressed and they need to get rid of things and start teaching them how to intelligently rest and stimulate their parasympathetic nervous system. I'll link all the resources in the show notes, of course, that I talked about and I would love to hear from you.
Let me know if you have questions. Let me know if you have requests for future episodes. I'm doing this all for you. So let me know how I can help you. Have a great day. See you next week.
