Anxiety has become so pervasive that many of you report it has become your “new normal” to live in a state of constant anxiety, fear, and overwhelm.
Sadly, living with constant and chronic anxiety keeps your body stuck in a state of stress that can disrupt not only your mental health, but your physical body as well.
Supporting your parasympathetic nervous system can help you reduce your anxiety and support health and healing.
What Causes Anxiety?
Anxiety is triggered by chemical reactions that activate multiple systems in your body and brain, including the activation of your survival mechanism.
Anxiety is a repetitive experience of FEAR.
Some fear is necessary for survival. Fear keeps you on alert to potential or imminent danger. When anxiety occurs, it can feel like the world is unsafe and unpredictable. Your survival mechanisms go on high alert, and everything else needs to shut down so you can devote all of your available energy to detecting danger. This danger detection can create a “worst-case scenario” cascade in which you envision potential dangers from the past, present, or future.
In this state, your view of the world narrows, and it becomes all but impossible to see the big picture. Your primal response kicks into gear, and everything else has to subjugate itself to the demands of your anxiety’s survival trigger. That means your digestion, immune system, detoxification, and even your awareness and interest in others are diminished. It takes a lot of energy to be anxious.
How Anxiety Affects the Body and Brain
Your sympathetic nervous system, also called the “fight-or-flight” system, is the first to activate when fear occurs. When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, it triggers your heart rate and blood pressure to increase, your breath to quicken, your muscles tighten in anticipation of fighting or fleeing, and your brain scans for danger—all of which present as symptoms of anxiety.
Adrenals – Your sympathetic response triggers your adrenal glands to increase cortisol and epinephrine output, providing your organs and muscles with the fuel needed to respond to stress. Over time, excessive cortisol signals to your body that it’s time to fight or flee, which keeps your perception of stress and anxiety amplified.
Blood Sugar – Anxiety also spikes blood sugar to provide your body and brain with the fuel they need to respond to potential threats. Blood sugar imbalances can contribute to dysregulation, such as insulin resistance or hypoglycemia. When your cells lack fuel, including brain fuel, it impairs your ability to think clearly or to mobilize yourself out of an anxious situation.
Narrowed perception – Your sympathetic response narrows your perception, enabling you to identify and survive threats. Just as the sympathetic nervous system turns off all functions not critical to survival, including your ability to digest food, it also turns off your ability to focus on anything outside of the pressing danger. This hyper focus on danger locks you into a state of constantly scanning for threats, shutting down your ability to thoughtfully contemplate different perspectives that might feel threatening to your safety, which can amplify anxiety.
Excitatory neurotransmitters – Your brain increases production of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate, which speeds up brain function and simultaneously reduces your levels of the inhibitory and calming neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which reduces the experience of anxiety
GABA inhibits brain activity, enabling you to relax. When the sympathetic nervous system is firing, glutamate can be released. In excess, overstimulating brain cells, and presenting as anxiety or panic attacks.
Research shows that activating your parasympathetic nervous system can help maintain a healthy balance between glutamate and its counterpart, GABA.
When you’re stuck in fight or flight, your glutamate is overactive, lowering your GABA levels, you’re keeping your brain stuck in the “on” position, triggering anxiety, overstimulation, and overwhelm.
Much as the accelerator and brakes in your car work together to control speed, GABA puts the brakes on brain activity to counter glutamate’s accelerative effects. When glutamate levels are high, you may experience anxiety, restlessness, inability to concentrate, insomnia, fatigue, and increased sensitivity to pain.
As you may recall, your sympathetic nervous system stimulates the motor neurons (for fighting or fleeing) and inhibits the sensory motor system, effectively reducing pain and feeling
How Stimulating Parasympathetic Relieves Anxiety
After a danger or perceived risk passes, you shift out of the sympathetic “fight or flight” state and return to the “rest, reset, and heal” parasympathetic state, which allows your body to recover and heal after a demanding physiological or psychological event.
When we are stuck in a cycle of sympathetic dominance—and not activating your parasympathetic nervous system—your body’s alert mechanism for survival remains on high, and you can become trapped in a perception that you are not safe, which lays the groundwork for anxiety.
You might think of the parasympathetic response as the brakes on the sympathetic response, which in turn puts the brakes on anxiety. The sympathetic system is employed in states of fear. The parasympathetic system is triggered by a sense of safety.
The parasympathetic system restores a sense of safety and balance, which calms the brain and the body by:
Calming neurotransmitters – The parasympathetic nervous system helps calm the overactivation of glutamate and restores healthy levels of GABA, which calms our panic response, and helps balance other neurotransmitters, including serotonin, which governs general mood, anger, aggression, and fear responses.
Expanding Awareness– The sense of safety allows you to soften and enhance your peripheral view of our surroundings, promoting an expanded awareness that helps you feel calm and safe. Research from the University of Oregon found that “greater parasympathetic activity is a marker of increased selective attention and neurocognitive function.” In the parasympathetic state, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to help enhance attention and learning. In your brain, acetylcholine modulates communication between brain regions to properly store information by speeding up or slowing down nerve signals. In your brain, acetylcholine is mainly excitatory, allowing your neurons to communicate so you can think clearly, learn new information, and form new memories.
Stabilizing Blood Sugar – a chronic sympathetic response increases blood sugar and insulin output, creating spikes in the brain’s blood sugar levels, which destabilize brain function. Research in Sweden with mice showed a significant drop in blood sugar levels as a direct result of parasympathetic nervous system stimulation. The research found that the sympathetic nervous system prepares you to fight or flee by reducing insulin release and increasing blood sugar to boost your energy. The parasympathetic nervous system operates in the opposite direction, lowering blood sugar to healthy levels. (Study).
Restoring heart and respiration rates – a healthy heart rate, known as Heart rate variability, helps to calm anxiety. In fact, research shows that healthy heart rate variability, a measure of how quickly you recover from stress, is associated with lower anxiety.
How Parasympathetic Calms Fear and Anxiety
Activating your parasympathetic nervous system helps to inhibit anxiety, according to research, which found that when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases anti-anxiety chemicals that contribute to faster recovery time from illness, injury, stress, and emotional trauma.
Research titled “Fear and anxiety take a double hit from vagal nerve stimulation” documents how activating your parasympathetic nervous system via vagus nerve stimulation helps to quell anxiety and fear.
What’s more, when stimulated, your vagus nerve releases the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine, which calms anxiety by relaxing the smooth muscles in your artery walls, dilating the arteries, and slowing your heartbeat. It may also enhance memory consolidation, helping process fear memories and inhibit exaggerated fear expression, such as anxiety. (Read more about Acetylcholine.
Your vagus nerve helps your autonomic nervous system communicate fear and danger information to your amygdala. In simple terms, the vagus nerve detects the release of the stress hormone epinephrine, which acts as a “something important just happened” signal that is communicated to other fear centers in the brain. Activation or inhibition of this signal “can enhance or decrease the rate of fear extinction.”
“By enhancing fear extinction while quelling anxiety, vagal stimulation delivers a double hit against maladaptive fear. This may make vagal stimulation particularly useful in cases where severe anxiety prevents effective exposure therapy.”
You may recall that your vagus nerve controls your relaxation response. In addition to helping you relax by releasing acetylcholine, the vagus nerve’s tendrils extend to many organs, acting like fiber-optic cables that send instructions to release enzymes and proteins like prolactin, vasopressin, and oxytocin, which calm you down.
This is one way the vagus nerve helps counterbalance the effects of the sympathetic nervous system—by signaling for the release of prolactin, vasopressin, and oxytocin, all of which dampen the sympathetic activation and help you calm down, manage, and recover more quickly from stress, which helps offset anxiety.
“Centrally released oxytocin has behavioral effects, particularly on social behaviors, and appears to have a calming influence,” according to Science Direct’s “Neurochemistry of Prosocial Decision Making: The Role of Dopamine, Serotonin, and Oxytocin”.
You can naturally stimulate your vagus nerve by topically applying our stimulatory Parasympathetic® behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone, where the vagus nerve is closest to the surface of your body.
Stimulating your vagus nerve also triggers the release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine into an area of the brain called the amygdala, which strengthens memory storage and improves your ability to process and retain information.
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References:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6172183/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/psyp.13079
- https://news.ki.se/how-our-nerves-regulate-insulin-secretion
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4092363/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176918/
- https://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s1/chapter11.html
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128013038000033
