Breath Training Along the Full Movement Spectrum
Part II
Breathing for Nervous System Regulation
What is the Nervous System?
The nervous system is involved in receiving information about the environment around us (sensation) and generating responses to that information (motor responses/movement). The nervous system can be divided into regions that are responsible for sensation (sensory functions) and for the response (motor functions).
The nervous system has two main parts:
The central nervous system is made up of the brain and spinal cord.
The peripheral nervous system is made up of nerves that branch off from the spinal cord and extend to all parts of the body.
Your breathing usually does not require any thought, because it is controlled by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), also called the involuntary nervous system. The parasympathetic and sympathetic systems are two parts of the ANS. The parasympathetic system slows breathing, while the sympathetic system speeds it up.
How you feel about your perception of the environment (or your motor responses), via your sensory system, will determine how you breathe. For instance, if you perceive threat your breathing might get quicker, along with your heart rate. If you feel relaxed, your breathing might slow down. If you’re steady-state, your breathing will be pretty balanced. This will all happen automatically, since breathing is controlled mostly by an “un”conscious process.
What is Nervous System Regulation?
In order to turn your involuntary motor responses (like breathing) into conscious motor responses (like conscious breathing), you have to be able to observe how you feel or are perceiving the world (your perception based on the information from your environment/sensory inputs). When we interact consciously in this process, we are attempting to observe ourselves and potentially regulate the sensory/response feedback loops. This is, at its very heart, Pillar 1: Connection to Self with proprioception/interoception awareness.
Let’s consider it from a common, very pertinent example:
Jane has trained an unconscious tendency to grab her phone and scroll. When she does this, she visits her regular feedback loops (news, email, social media) where she gets stuck for at least 30 minutes. She hasn’t noticed her body’s response at all, but as she scrolled she got upset by a few headlines, her heart rate and breathing changed, and now she’s feeling anxious/angry. Her perception of the headlines (maybe fear or lack of safety) alerted a sympathetic activation response, which automatically shifted her Nervous System into activation. The body is responding to her perception as a threatened, unsafe stressor. When in fact, she is in the safety of her home, surrounded by all the comforts that should have her feeling safe. She’s altered her physiology by interacting with a perceived threat, not a real one.
Do this enough and you’re living in your own private, self-inflicted hellscape called anxiety. Do it even more and we call it hypertension or depression or panic attacks…
The main point here, is that we must begin to know + pay attention to how we feel and why we feel the ways we do. If we feel:
balanced, Why? How is the body/mind communicating this?
Imbalanced, Why? How is the body/mind communicating this?
If there is a need to fulfill, like you need to calm down because you feel stress (whatever those inputs are, they’re different for everyone) or you need to get energized, breath can be a primary tool to not only change your state, but to assess it in the first place. You can use it to regulate yourself or to get in your body to determine what is needed.
Nervous System Regulation simply means to (1) know what state you are in and (2) respond, if needed
Nervous System Regulation (NSR) is NOT just to calm down…
Y’all — our Modern Lives have put us in our heads more than our bodies. This is perhaps my mission with Pillar Strength; to get us into this awareness. The reality we are in separates us from our Self. Distractions abound and we’ve grown away from knowing ourselves and what we need. We continuously downgrade our self-awareness, our self-care, our primary needs and focus that energy outwards. As you know, I believe we must turn our energy inwards to become strong, and with that strength, we can then harness the outside world. No matter what the inputs may be.
That said, one mainstream narrative around NSR is that we all need to calm down. And while I believe that is the case for many, it’s not the case for all. Some of us need to amp UP. It’s not about breathing to be Calm, it’s about breathing to be centered, neutral, balanced. But in order to do this, you must to know what you need in the first place!!!!!!
This is why I always suggest this Pillar 1 Feedback Loop:
We use breathing to begin our movement practice, every session, to establish a baseline over time of what it feels like to be in your body, without the distraction of larger movements. Many of us don’t know what that feels like. And without that regular slowing-down practice, we inhibit our ability to sense our body’s messages (pain, tension, overactive mind, calm, intuition, high/low energy). This disconnect is a significant issue plaguing our population (more on that in the next series!), so it’s very much worth the time to start this (tiny) movement practice.
Using a regular breath practice can allow us to ask, “Now that I can listen to my body, what do I need or what is it saying?” (over and over) until it becomes a habit. If you’re feeling tired, depressed, low-energy, and you know it’s not any of the main culprits—you could use another kind of Breathing Exercise that gets you UP to your center. Conversely, if you are feeling amped up, anxious, nervous, you might need to breathe DOWN to a centered feeling.
Breathing iExercises abound as powerful tools in NSR. But most important, it can be an immediate check-in for all-things Self-Awareness, because if you don’t know what you need, you can’t find the right movement (breathing in this case) to help you restore balance.
In Part III, we will understand how to use Breath to increase Mobility in key musculo-skeletal structures.
