Here’s How Stress and Anxiety Affect Your Nervous System
Do you know what the ANS is and what it has to do with stress and anxiety?
The ANS is your autonomic nervous system. It plays an important role in helping you respond to stressful situations. It’s important to know that the ANS is shaped in early experience and reshaped throughout life. This creates habitual response patterns.
While patterns that don’t support you in a healthy way can be hard to break, the good news is patterns can be interrupted and reshaped. Learning to listen to responses offered by the nervous system can inform how to soothe it, moving toward safety and connection.
The ANS is divided into 3 parts with protective roles:
The ANS acts like a ladder - depending on which ‘rung’ of the ladder you’re on determines whether your nervous system is dysregulated or regulated - allowing you to feel safe and secure.
Author Deb Dana, author of a number of books about how to tap into polyvagal theory to calm a stressed out nervous system says this:
“The ability to respond and recover from the challenges of daily living is a marker of well-being and depends on the actions of the ANS”
To understand how to do this, we need to begin by understanding how our nervous systems become dysregulated in the first place. The ANS, or autonomic nervous system (learn more about in from our earlier post!) is divided into three parts with protective roles:
🔴The dorsal vagal system activates strategies of immobilization - when we feel flooded, we lose the ability to reason regulate.
🟡The sympathetic system is where fight or flight kicks in.
🟢The ventral vagal system is where regulation takes place, allowing us to feel safe and to build trust with others to help us feel safe.
If you see yourself in the dorsal or sympathetic stages, don't worry. It's normal to experience all three states. Difficulty arises when we find ourselves stuck in either of those stages, as our brain and body feels hijacked and in survival mode. We feel dysregulated when we're in either of those stages.
Moving into the ventral vagal stage allows the brain and the body to work together. This is where regulation happens.
How therapy can support healing the process of regulating your nervous system:
Therapy can be a helpful place to start making changes as you can safely explore these patterns. Many people who show up for therapy have a compromised ability to regulate their nervous system. Therapy sessions offer a safe place to discover patterns and learn how to regulate in a safe space. A good therapist helps clients by providing a reliable and safe space to uncover triggers and patterns, creating opportunities to learn and practice how to regulate. Therapists can also suggest exercises and tools that can be used to help calm the nervous system.
Having a safe person help discover patterns and put recovery tools to good use in session is just the starting point. The time in-between sessions are just as important as they allow time to practice self-regulating like moving from training wheels to mastery on a bike. Repeated sessions with a reliable and trusted therapist over time reinforces these skills and helps the nervous system to develop a sense of safety and connection.
Gradually over time, through small steps and practice, painful patterns can be interrupted and reshaped, helping the ANS to be stay in a more regulated state more often.
Awareness: The first step to recovery
Since many of these habitual response patterns to anxiety, stress, and trauma are exactly that, patterns, often they are done subconsciously. Healing begins with awareness, recognizing:
What our triggers are
How we respond
How our bodies physically react
We’ll look at what role awareness plays in our next blog post.
