What the heck is nervous system (dys)regulation?

If you’ve reached the point of burnout, then by sheer definition you’ve been dealing with a lot of stress lately- and you’re probably feeling it in your body. You might feel run down and exhausted, sleep deprived, and more. It turns out that many health problems that stem from stress are actually rooted in nervous system dysregulation.

This term gets thrown around a lot on social media, so you might be wondering- what does it MEAN to have a “dysregulated” nervous system? And what are you supposed to do about it?

In this blog post- and the accompanying video- I’ll be explaining this all in terms you can understand.

You, Your Body, and Stress

We’ve all been there. That looming work deadline. The dreaded email from a colleague. A blowout fight with your partner. Or just… traffic and bad driving. You feel your heart rate speed up and your temperature rise. Your breath quickens and you may even start to sweat.

Your stress response is turned on- or in fancier words, the sympathetic state of your autonomic nervous system has been activated. It’s fight-or-flight time.

Your autonomic nervous system- which controls a long list of involuntary bodily functions like breathing, digestion, and sexual reproduction- has two states:

1. Sympathetic: ‘fight-or-flight’

2. Parasympathetic: ‘rest-and-digest’

Normally, these two states turn on and off regularly and exist in balance (also called homeostasis). You need both to survive. But many of us lack that balance because we’re stressed so frequently- our nervous system is dysregulated and we’re living most of our lives in fight-or-flight. It’s exhausting! Let’s look at why this happens.

Understanding the stress response

Originally, humans’ stress response was designed to help us to escape life-threatening danger. For example, if you were living in the wild and came face to face with a lion, your sympathetic nervous system would switch into high gear.

Your adrenal glands would start pumping out cortisol and adrenaline, to help you think quickly and respond to danger. Stored blood sugar would be released into the body, sending energy to your limbs so that you could escape the impending threat. And non-essential bodily functions like digestion and sexual reproduction would be put on hold so that you could focus 100% on the task at hand: saving your own life.

Today still, all of this happens nearly instantaneously when your brain perceives a threat. But here’s the kicker:

It doesn’t matter whether the threat is a hungry lion or a dreaded email. Your body responds just the same.

That would be fine, except that humans tend to have a tough time getting out of fight-or flight-mode. There’s a famous book that highlights this distinction between humans and other animals, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” (by Robert M. Sapolsky). Sapolsky explains that when a lion attacks a pack of zebras, their stress response is activated and they flee. Maybe the lion kills one zebra. At that point, the threat is gone, and the rest of the zebras go back to chewing grass and living their lives, as if nothing happened.

We humans struggle with that. When we get stressed, it’s almost always a non-life-threatening situation. So we’re not running or fighting off an enemy. There is no physical response. All those hormones that are released into the body when the sympathetic nervous system is activated start to accumulate and cause problems.

But the other thing is, humans have a hard time letting go of stress. Think about the last time you had a fight with a friend. There was the moment that the fight happened. And then there’s all the time that you spent rehashing it in your mind, activating your stress response again and again. In other words, most people are stressed out just from their own recurring thoughts where they’re rehashing the past or worrying about the future. It never ends.

And when the sympathetic nervous system gets turned on too often and you don’t have effective stress comping mechanisms in place, physical symptoms will appear. Like chronic fatigue and insomnia. Some people develop persistent headaches (that was me). You’ll also notice some emotional/mental symptoms emerge, too. Like increased anxiety (even when nothing ‘big’ is happening), moodiness, and persistent feeling of being ‘on edge’.

Any of that sound familiar?

The bottom line is that if you’re burnt out, your nervous system is likely dysregulated. But there are simple things you can do to fix it, and get yourself out of constant fight-or-flight and back into a more ease-full, rested state.

To learn more about how to know if your nervous system is dysregulated, and what to do to fix it, watch the video below: