Why Mental Health Isn’t Just Mental: The Role of the Nervous System in Mental Health Experiences
By Lily Hall, LCSW.
A lot of mental health is talked about through the cognitive lens, however, mental health actually often starts in our body! Have you noticed how so many symptoms of depression and anxiety have to do more with our body than our mind? That is because our nervous system is usually the one sending messages that activate symptoms of mental health conditions or particular thought cycles.
Our nervous system works with our primal brain, which means its focus is very simple: safety and survival. Our nervous system is regulated by the vagus nerve, which you can think of as the brain-body highway. It is constantly communicating from our brain to our body and our body to our brain, but one important thing to note is that 80% of communication is upwards from our body to our brain. This is why no matter how much you try to “think” your way into safety, it often just doesn’t quite work. It’s 20% brain saying we’re safe vs. 80% our body saying it senses something it has deemed a threat.
The nervous system has three states: regulated rest and digest, fight or flight, and freeze. Our system is constantly assessing our internal and external world for threats. When it senses a threat, it typically shifts first into a fight/flight space. In a fight or flight survival response, you may feel increased heart rate, sweating, muscle tension, aggression, a strong urge to leave, dizziness, and/or nausea due to activation of the sympathetic system giving you a burst of survival energy. When our system begins to feel stuck in a stressful situation, it shifts into a freeze state. In a freeze response, it begins to attempt to conserve energy and you may feel things like brain fog, fatigue, hopelessness, and/or numbness.
Let’s think about this through a primal lens for a second. If a rabbit senses a coyote nearby, they’re first going to go into fight/flight and try to escape. If that doesn’t work and they are caught, their freeze response comes online. With their freeze response active, a coyote could think they are dead, put them down, and then the rabbit has the opportunity to bring the stored fight/flight energy back online and run away. Running away discharges the energy and completes the stress response cycle.
Unfortunately, our primal brains in a lot of ways haven’t adapted super well to modern day life. For example, our nervous system could perceive receiving an email as a threat. It can shift into fight/flight, but then we just continue to sit at our desks and never complete the stress response cycle! We’re left with a burst of survival chemicals and energy that has nowhere to go. This can lead to discomfort and an ongoing feeling of anxiety. So, it is really important that we be intentional about creating moments of safety for our nervous system and also creating opportunities to release pent up survival energy from our bodies moving in and out of dysregulated states throughout each day.
One of the great things is that the vagus nerve in some ways is like a muscle. The more you engage it, the stronger it’s ability to bounce back to regulation and move through stress becomes! Increasing your vagal tone helps your body begin to move more flexibly in and out of states of stress, rather than experiencing stress and getting stuck in this survival response. Here are a few of my favorite ways to regulate your nervous system and release stress:
Practice physiological sighs: Inhale through your nose once. Pause. Take another short inhale in, like an extra sip of oxygen, then exhale through your mouth for 6-8 seconds. Repeat 2-3x.
1 minute somatic release: Unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders, shake your hands out, move your eyes side to side, stick out your tongue and exhale, then take 3 deep belly breaths.
Proprioceptive Input: Proprioception is your body’s ability to know where it is at any given time. You can create proprioceptive input by- getting or giving hugs, stomping your feet, weighted blankets, rolling up tightly in a blanket like a burrito, star jumps or pushups, massages, or sitting on the ground and pressing your back firmly into the wall.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Find a comfortable position laying down or seated. Take a few deep, grounding belly breaths and begin to focus on your breathing. Starting with your feet, begin to tense your feet muscles as tightly as you can without strain, hold for 5 seconds, then release. Continue to repeat this, moving through muscle groups in your body (calves, thighs/hips, stomach/chest, arms/hands, face, then the entire body together). Focus on noticing the sensation of tension, then the opposite sensations of relaxation.
For a more in-depth list of options, you can click here.
This blog was written by Lily Hall, LCSW