If you can get to understand the basic functioning of your nervous system in its’ simplest form, it sheds light on those reactions that sometimes explode out of us before we have time to stop them and allows us to make changes which lead to engagement with the people in our lives in a more gentle but firm manner.
Our nervous system has two parts to it the Central Nervous system CNS and the Autonomic Nervous system ANS. The CNS controls voluntary movement so walking, talking, writing, anything that we control. The ANS controls all the automatic functions of our body like heartbeat, digestion, hormone production, detoxification, and thousands of other processes that we don’t have to think about, they just happen in the background largely unconscious to us.
The ANS also has two different parts to it, Sympathetic or Fight and Flight (F&F), and Parasympathetic or Rest and Repair (R&R), and we function very differently in each of those states. In fact it would be safe to say that we are very different animals in each of those emotional states.
Before we continue let’s consider a little stress exercise to help illustrate this:
Answer the following four questions as if you are at your best, you are feeling great about yourself, your bank balance is good, your work is going well, you are not in a hurry or facing any deadlines, you have all the time in the world, how would you deal with these situations?
- A client is rude to you on the phone.
- A car cuts you off in traffic.
- A child refuses to do something you have asked them to do.
- Your spouse criticises you.
When I do this exercise in my workshops the words that come up are: patience, understanding, kindness, calm, humour, forgiveness, etc. And what I tell the people in the class is that this is the real them, their authentic selves.
Now answer the same four questions as if you are super stressed, you owe money, you are late for an appointment, your job or business is at stake, or you are on the brink of burnout. How do you deal with those situations now? How often have you had an argument with someone and said some things you have regretted. The next day you might go back to apologise and say something like; “I apologise for my reference to jackass and remembering to bring your brain to meetings, I wasn’t being myself,” or “that wasn’t like me.” So, who was it then? Who was it like? We know intrinsically that it wasn’t our true selves, but we have to acknowledge that was still a part of us acting that behaviour out, we were a different animal, weren’t we?
If we can understand the differences in our physiology when our nervous system changes from R&R to F&F and how that feels in our body, then we can start to understand how our nervous system works and learn how to use it to support our goals and aspirations rather than sabotage them. this is called emotional agility, instead of the tail wagging the dog, the dog can start to wag the tail.