Mental & Emotional Health

Are you sick of learning about stress yet? Have I stressed you out enough yet? We’re on day EIGHT of the Stressball entries. I am enjoying writing them, and I seem to be receiving a lot of comments on how people are reacting to ‘em. Guess I’ll finish things up with a bit on how stress effects your nervous system.

Your nervous system responds to stress alongside the endocrine system. It is trigger by the “subjective perceptions of threat” whether the stress/threat is real or imagined. (So even when you just think of stress, your nervous system begins to react!) There is a disruption of your sympathetic & parasympathetic branches of your body during reactions to stress.

Let me tell you a bit about the human peripheral nervous system!
It is voluntary: it regulates your sensory perception (hearing/seeing/etc) as well as muscle movement (those biceps, those eyeballs, your flapping tongue!). Your cerebral cortex is part of this voluntary piece, controlling your consciousness.
It is autonomic: it regulates your organ function and your homeostasis levels. These autonomic processes are unconscious events that you have no real control over. This autonomic piece also controls your limbic & other primitive systems in your body.

There are two branches to your autonomic nervous system:
Parasympathetic Branch deals with:
relaxation, digestion, reproduction, tissue repair & social bonding.
Sympathetic Branch deals with the “four F’s”:
fighting, fleeing, fear and … uhm, … having sex.

The parasympathetic and sympathetic branch work together as though they were elephants on a see saw trying to keep everything in balance. (What a hilarious mental picture I get when I think about that, by the way!)

During a stress response, your two branches react quite differently:
sympathetic branch responds by dilating pupils, lowering salivation levels, increasing your heart rate, speeding up and shallowing your breathing rate, lowering secretion levels, increasing your blood flow & tension levels and increases your sweating.
parasympathetic branch responds in pretty much the opposite by constricting pupils, increasing your salivation, lowering your heart rate, slowing and deepening of your breathing, increasing your secretions (to aid in digestion), lessening your blood flow and your sweating levels.

mental & emotional health, stress, nervous system, central nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system