Easy ways to regulate your nervous system

Published Nov 25, 2024, 2:00 PM

If you want to understand your nervous system a little better, then tune in as psychologist Anna Nikolaou discusses how our body responds to stress and the most important things to help balance it. 

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Well, hello there, thanks for joining us on Extra Healthy Ish. Yes, we are totally vibing the extra Today you have tuned into the big Sister podcast Till Healthy Ish from Body and Soul. I am your host at Felicity Harley. Now, we all want to understand our nervous system a little better and not believe everything we read on social media about it. Well, today we have psychologists Anna Nicolau, and she's here to discuss how our body and mind respond to stress and the most important things you can do to bring a bit more balance to it all. Anna, nice to have you on extra health Ish. Thank you for having me. Now, before we talk all things nervous system, I have to ask you the big question, how do you stay extra health ish? Yeah?

Good question. I do prioritize a lot of my self care. When I focus on my nutrition, I do. I'm mindful of what I eat. But I also exercise. I go for my walks. That's my way of clearing my mind. I do pilates a few times during the week just for strength.

That sounds pretty good to me.

It's pretty good.

I mean, you're a psychologist. You're seeing people who come to you and unload their worries and their insecurities and their anxieties. How do you keep your mental health on track and manage that side of your job?

I think by I learned so much from my clients too. And yeah, we do talk about a lot of heavy, heavy situations and things that are going on, which is why the walks is great for me to clear my mind. But also I've learned the skills that I teach my clients of catching my thoughts. I'm really aware of my thoughts. I'm aware of how my thoughts impact my mood. I'm aware of then how that mood impacts my behavior, and then how that behavior impacts and outcomes. So I'm really good at catching thoughts. I don't run with my emotions, so I think I've learned to be a lot more logical and not run with a feeling that I experienced in the moment.

Has this been something that you've got better with, you know, through your career or is it something that you were pretty good you know?

What?

I perhaps what I'm asking is can we all get there? Does it take practice? Definitely, we can all get there.

This is something that these are skills we can learn, and it's important to start learning how to catch our thoughts and to understand the impact thoughts have on mood. I love seeing clients come in for the first time and see them struggling and then seeing how they just grow from that and learn some strategies that they implement and see the positive changes. So it's something that we definitely can work on and improve over time.

How do we catch our thoughts? Like do you just tell yourself stop that story you know that it might not be true, or how do you actually catch your thoughts?

I know, because our thoughts are so automatic, aren't they Yeah, and we notice our emotions more like we're good at sort of catching how we feel. We're not great at catching our thoughts because they're so quick, and then we react. Some people aren't even good at catching their emotions. They notice the behavior. So this is when through counseling is a great way to you know, when you're talking it through with someone to sort of start identifying patterns to your thinking. You know, you start realizing that you've picked up some maybe not so great habits, like a negative style of thinking that's impacting how you're feeling and how you're coping. But it is a conscious thing. It is about learning to notice how you feel and then go back a step. So if you notice you're feeling anxious and stress that your body is saying, go back a step. There's something you were thinking that's triggered this mood, and then hear what your self talk is, because it is our self talk. We've got this chatter going on throughout the day. Is it more on the negative side? If it's got sort of a more of a negative tone, then we're naturally going to be, you know, feeling more sort of anxious or stressed or angry, depending on you know, what our automatic sort of thoughts, our style of thinking is.

One thing that I have been trying to practice lately is questioning my thoughts as well. Why am I thinking that that is not true? What am I telling myself? What is that belief I've made up about X that's making me feel about why? And I feel like that that's walk cool at the moment.

I guess that's what you need to be working on. That's where we're going to see more change. You know, we can do all the other things to help manage stress and anxiety, you know, like the self care and you know, other breathing and things like that. They're all great to reduce our anxiety and stress, but we've got to look at what the core is. You know, what is it that's triggering our stress and anxiety? How is it that I'm perceiving situations that are making me feel stressed and anxious. So we do need to catch our thoughts and that's where we see the long term benefits. Once we start creating new habits, new styles of thinking that are more positive and good for us, then we're going to have more benefits long term. So it's great you're doing.

That well attempting. Yeah, let's talk a bit about how the stress and overwhelm affects our body and how it plays out. I mean, there's so much around about the nervous system, and you know, I feel like everyone's saying my nervous system's disregulated. I mean, that's popping up on my Instagram feed all the time. What are you seeing?

Are you?

Are we in this constant state of flight and fight?

Well, that's what we're finding. I think with our if we perceive a situation as stressful, our body then reacts to that. So our body then you know, it's identifying there's some sort of a threat, there's some sort of danger, so then it starts to respond and that's when our sympathetic nervous system is activated. So that's when our pupil will dilate, that's when our heart rate will increase, that's when our adrenaline will start firing off. And these are all responses that are designed to be able to fight or flight given there's a dangerous situation. But the problem is with a lot of the situations when we're perceiving that are stressful, that they're not life threatening. We don't need to be going our body to be reacting as.

Ready to ready to run or fight.

Yes, but we've interpreted it to be quite stressful, then our body is reacting to it in that way. And what happens over time if we are constantly identifying situations that are quite stressful or just not coping with the day to day stresses, then our body is in that response mode for a lot longer, and then that's when we see a lot of the health consequences to that.

We'll be back after this short break with it. More from Anna talk to us a bit about the parasi emathetic nerve system and how we can perhaps I mean should we be in. We should really spend most of our time in the parasympathetic stationn't we. Well, that's the role.

So the parasympathetic nervous system comes after the sympathetic nervous systems been activated. That's then designed to come and just calm everything down once the threat's gone. It's bring everything back to its sort of neutral state. That's where we would like to be, I mean most of the time, but we're.

Not often enough. How do we get there? How do we get there? Is the big question? How can we better tap into the parasympathetic I.

Think it's when we learn to manage our stress and anxiety. And the best way to manage our stress and anxiety is looking at what is triggering, at what sets us off? What is our thoughts that trigger stress and anxiety? And I think when we work on managing our thoughts, which then comes our anxiety, I think we would be more likely to be operating in a power sympathetic nervous system state.

How do we do that? Manage our thoughts? Manage our thoughts? Well, that's something you can do.

If we see a psychologist, you can work with them to the more situations that arise, just sort of pull it apart, look back at well, what went wrong there? What was I thinking at that time? Was that actually accurate? Was there a different way I could have been thinking about that? So identifying some habits sort of not so good habits to your style of thinking, that's probably just intensifying or ramping up anxiety in stress that we don't necessarily need to be thinking. You know, evidence checking up, where's the evidence that that bad thing's going to happen? So I really feel managing our thoughts is the best way to reduce some manage our anxiety and stress. But then there's the self care strategies and put in place that can help calm the body down and reduce your anxiety and stress.

What about let's talk about self care in a minute. Managing thoughts? How can we get better to better at this in the day to day of our lives? I agree, I think, I mean, I almost think we all need to go to therapy to unpack certain things that have gone on in our lives and know if we're making up false stories about it or I've got false beliefs. But what are some ways that we can do it in our day to day.

I think it's this a conscious decision to be just noticing how you react to things around you, just noticing your behavior and noticing how you're feeling throughout the day, just checking in on your body. Your body's communicating to you all the time, but we just missed the signs. If our heart rate is constantly up, we're sweating and shaking. Our body is trying to tell us there's something wrong here. You're stressed and anxious. So we need to be listening to our bodies a lot more. And when that happens, then it's okay. So what is triggering this stress and anxiety right now? Really got to understand what's going on in this situation that's making me perceive it as stressful that I need to work on.

Talk to us about self care. What can we because self care is often such an interesting I think it's just such a loaded term self care, isn't it, because self care is sold to us with bath bombs and candles and bullshit. But then true self care to really boost your mental health. What does this look like from your expert standpoint?

Well, self care basically is just getting back to basics, which we should you know, should come naturally really you know, good sleep, you know, being able to sleep while or having a good sleep routine, eating while exercising. They're the three main self care strategies I would be looking at because if we don't have those, it's very hard to build on that. You know, we all need sleep. We know what happens if we don't sleep well. We know what it does to our brain. You know, that's when we're sleeping, That's when our brain is you know, detoxing from all the things that have happened during the day. If we don't sleep well, we wake up and we're fatigued, and we can't think clearly, and we can't function when we don't have enough sleep. So sleep is so important. We really need to be looking at what is my sleep routine? And am I prioritizing sleep? Am I giving it enough importance?

What happens if you struggle to get to sleep because you've got so much going on in your brain and you're ruminating on whatever stressful thing is going on in your life.

Look, there are some strategies to help sort of calm that. You know, the chatter that happens at night, because that's when we've got less distraction, so all of a sudden everything comes up.

I mean, this is where we.

Look at exercise. If we exercise during the day, that helps promote better sleep at night. So that was the other self care strategy is we need to be exercising and we see the benefits of that, but at night when we do sort of start overthinking, you know, it's sometimes best to have a journal next to you write down everything that's going through your mind. Its almost like you're downloading it. Just get it all on paper and then you just close that book and say, Okay, it's there for me to look at tomorrow. I don't need to have it going around and around in my head throughout the night in case I'm going to forget it in the morning.

It's there. What about the nutrition side of things, So.

Nutrition has been studies around gut health and the importance of gut health and our mental health. So again, nutrition is so important to how we feel. If we feel good again through exercise, better sleep, better nutrition, we're more resilient. We can cope better with situations that are going on around us when we are able to think more positively. When we lack in those areas, we're more vulnerable and susceptible to negative styles, are thinking.

It's a cycle, isn't it. Yeah, And then when one goes out, when you goes out, nutrition goes out, and then I'm too tired to exercise. But then you just got to get back in the cycle because once the cycle is humming, you actually can feel amazing.

When it's all working, all of them together. You see the difference where you know, you're clear headed, your focused, We've got energy.

It's a very different experience. Just befo, I go want to ask you one more thing, how do we get better at catching our thoughts? Because your thoughts can run away? I know they do, And how do we stop?

That's that is just one that I think. You've just got to keep checking in with yourself. You know some people I know they set a timer to check in, you know, a couple of times a day, check.

In on my thoughts.

You know what am I thinking? Noticing? You know how your body is responding throughout the day. It really is just a conscious decision to be catching thoughts or at least being more able to recognize how your body is responding to certain situations. It's not easy, and it takes a lot of practice, and we're not going to catch all our thoughts.

Some days are going to be better.

At it and other days they're going to slip, and that's okay. But if we can start being a little bit more in tune with our thoughts and catching ourselves and having more insight and awareness into our style of thinking, that's something that we can then look at working.

On and hopefully feel better and mentally healthy. Goal and thank you for coming out extra healthy. Thank you so much for having me the nervous system. I feel like you can just there is so much to learn about it and about yours and how to better tune into yours and know whether you are in the parasympathetic or the sympathetic and really listen to your body. Hope you enjoyed the advice from Anna. If you did, tell us you can review this episode, subscribe to this podcast, anything else, head to Body and Soul dot com dot you, follow us on socials, grab our print edition, which is our your local Sunday paper. Any feedback DM me at Felicity Harley and thanks again for listening. Stakes for Healthyish