Welcome to Nervous System Expansion
A FREE community with daily somatic practice to create a felt sense of safety, support and expansion in your body.
Somatics and breathwork practice daily allows your window tolerance to expand and respond over react to daily challenges stress and triggers and allows you to come back to parasympathetic calm aliveness and presence.
How your nervous system state impacts your health.
What nervous system state do you feel you operate in most - comment below 1, 2, 3.
1 - Sympathetic Nervous System - fight / flight
- Anxiety, Anger, Perfection, Hyper-vigilence
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is a branch of the autonomic nervous system that triggers the response, preparing the body for action, stress, or danger. It increases heart rate, dilates pupils, relaxes airways, and redirects blood to muscles, often acting in opposition to the parasympathetic to maintain balance.
Key Aspects of the Sympathetic Nervous System:
- Function: It governs involuntary reactions to stress, such as increasing cardiac output, boosting blood glucose for energy, and stimulating sweat production to cool the body.
- Fight-or-Flight Mechanism: When danger is perceived, the SNS acts swiftly to prioritize survival, such as releasing adrenaline from the adrenal glands, slowing digestion to conserve energy, and slowing down non-essential functions.
- Health Impact: Chronic activation of this system due to constant stress can lead to health problems, including high blood pressure and, in some cases, sustained rapid heart rate.
2 - Dorsal Vagal Shutdown or Hypoarousal
- Overwhelm, fatigue, exhaustion,
The freeze state is an involuntary nervous system response to overwhelming stress or trauma, acting as a survival mechanism when fight-or-flight fails. It triggers immobility, numbness, and exhaustion to conserve energy, often manifesting as "functional freeze," where an individual seems productive externally but feels detached, numb, or chronically anxious internally
Key Characteristics of the Freeze Response
- Physical Symptoms: Muscle tension, low energy, fatigue, brain fog, decreased heart rate, or feeling heavy/weighted down.
- Emotional/Mental State:
- Behavioral Indicators: Social withdrawal, difficulty acting or speaking, and becoming "stuck" on tasks.
3 - Parasympathetic Nervous System
- Calm Aliveness, Presence, Regulation, Rest, Digest, Reproduce.
The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is one of two main divisions of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for "rest and digest" bodily functions that conserve energy and maintain homeostasis. It counteracts the sympathetic "fight or flight" response by decreasing heart rate, promoting digestion, and aiding in calming the body after stress.
Key Functions and Characteristics
- Rest and Digest: Dominates during quiet, resting conditions, managing activities like salivation, digestion, and urination.
- Physiological Effects: Lowers blood pressure, decreases heart rate, and stimulates intestinal activity.
- Energy Conservation: Promotes metabolic storage (e.g., glycogen synthesis) to save energy for future use.
- Neurotransmitter: The primary neurotransmitter released by the PSNS is acetylcholine
When we have trauma - too much, too fast, too soon, energy in motion - emotions are stuck in your body, lowering your frequency and feeling heavy dense and functional freeze.