The simplest nervous system hacks

Balancing the accelerator and the brake

Escaping the city in search of nervous system balance last weekend

The best things in life are free, they say, and this is undoubtedly true when it comes to balancing the nervous system.

Sure, there are many sophisticated (and expensive) ways we can find our way back into balance too – like a professional massage, a restorative yoga retreat, or a myriad of wonderful forms of body work.

But once we understand how our physiology works, and the signals that are travelling back and forth between body and brain via the highway of the central nervous system, it becomes much simpler to tweak the dial one way or another.

You can think of the nervous system as having an accelerator and a brake.

Most often in our busy modern lives we need to use the brake. We need to down-regulate an overly revved up system, bringing more settledness, calm, and ease to body and mind. But sometimes we need the opposite. When we find ourselves stuck in a frozen, shutdown, disconnected space, sometimes we need the accelerator to get things moving, bringing more energy, tone and activation to the system.

A balanced nervous system is not one that’s in a perpetual state of calm, but rather one that matches the demands of the current situation and moves fluidly and flexibly between modes, coming easily to rest between moments of challenge.

Last week I found myself in need of some rebalancing. The clues came in the form of various grumbling body symptoms, and my energy had become decidedly slumpy. I cleared the calendar for a weekend and stripped everything right back to basics. I pottered and meandered, and immersed myself in the deep greens of native bush and the rich blues of sky and ocean. And I focused on the ingredients that help to restore balance to my system – walking, breathing, moving, resting.

I took my weary limbs for a slow meander through a grove of zebra-striped Nikau Palms, to the top of a favourite hill, where I can hold a distant bird’s eye view of city life unfolding across the harbour. Where I can feel up close and personal with the vastness of the sky. Even with storm clouds looming on the horizon, the expansive vista and shift of perspective was an instant balm to my soul.

Storm clouds rolling in over Trig Hill

The Brakes

When the system needs to calm and unwind, it helps enormously to step away from screens. The sensory input and short-range focus keep us in a state of perpetual activation that drains our battery life fast. Nature is a great antidote, and expansive views which engage our peripheral vision have been shown to switch off the body’s stress response¹.

Moving our awareness from the thinking mind into the felt sense of the body also helps to make this shift. As we feel more, we think less, and our body starts to find harmony. We can bring gentle attention to the sensations and textures of our physiology, and anchor our awareness into spaces that support calm and grounding, like the back surface of the body resting against a chair, or the soles of the feet making contact with the earth.

And our breath can be a powerful tool. Breathing practices that focus on the exhale, or slow our breathing rhythm, help to apply the brakes to our system. A simple version of this is the 4-7-8 practice (breathing in for 4 counts, holding for 7, and out for 8) or the Humming Breath (exhaling with a long, slow humming sound).

The Accelerators

When everything feels sluggish and numb, we can bring more tone to the system through movement – shaking out the limbs, a bracing walk uphill, a dance in the kitchen. And if the energy is extremely low and these feel like a step too far, we can start just by shaking out our hands, taking a gentle stretch, or arching and flexing the spine, to begin to invite a little vibrancy and aliveness back into the body.

The breathing practices that help to apply the accelerator are the ones that focus on the inhale, or on a more rapid pace of breathing. Using Abdominal Breathing to invite fuller, deeper inhales is a great place to start. Or practices like Kapalbhati (the breath of fire), taught in yoga schools.

The Equalisers

Then there are my favourite practices, which offer a perfect blend of accelerator and brake, and nudge our system towards equilibrium, whichever end of the spectrum we find ourselves.

The simple act of walking falls into this camp. The alternating stimulation of the left and right sides of the body balances the hemispheres of our brain, and balances our nervous system. We use this same left-right stimulation in EMDR therapy², and indigenous cultures have long drawn on left-right rhythms, using practices like drumming as vehicles for healing.

My favourite breath practices to find this balance are the practice of Coherent Breathing (balancing the inhale and exhale for 5 counts each) and Alternate Nostril Breathing, which balances in/out and left/right simultaneously.

My weekend wanderings took me through this delightful grove of Nikau Palms - native only to New Zealand

We are often reaching for accelerators and brakes quite instinctively, but we tend to do this via less helpful avenues such as caffeine, alcohol, and a range of other substances - the uppers and the downers.

Instead, we can build our own mini toolbox of practices to tweak the dials.

Whilst a weekend of self-care is not always within reach, the good news is many of these ingredients are, and can fit into small pockets of time that can be woven through the day - a 10-minute walk in a lunch break, or 5 minutes of breathing instead of scrolling the phone before a meeting or appointment.

I believe that the best gift we can offer ourselves and this fractious world is showing up with a regulated nervous system.

What would become possible in our lives if we nourished our nervous systems a little more?

There are many more tools I could add, but let me hand it over to you. What are the essential ingredients that help your nervous system find balance? How do you replenish the tank when life has emptied it? And what impact does this have on your mood, energy, and health? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

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1. Research by Dr Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist at Stanford University, has shown that when we engage our peripheral vision by gazing at a horizon or a panoramic view, the stress response turns off and the nervous system switches into relaxation mode

2. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is an evidence-based and highly effective therapy, often used in the treatment of trauma. It was discovered by Francine Shapiro, whilst out walking.