Rebooting the nervous system and encouraging it to rest and repair is important, especially after practices like expressive writing. You may be full of emotion from your practice, and feeling overwhelmed with negative stuff that came up during the writing session. Regulating the nervous system out of fight or flight is key to healing and soothe the fear in the mind. Dialing down the anxiety can be done with a variety of practices.

Yoga, pranayama and meditation being my favorite. However, there are proven practices that get you into chill mode quickly and effectively.

I can teach some wonderfully gentle yoga, breathwork, nervous system self-hacks, practices to disconnect memory from emotion (further reducing the full emotional cup) and new ways to get affirmations into your subconsciousness.

It is so important to spend time in rest and repair vs. fight or flight in this world of ours. Every time you take your nervous system into rest and repair you give it a tune up and add to its resilience. There are now new scientific ways, mixed with yogic wisdom to achieve coherence / rest and repair with effective practices. A sample practice being the heart-focused breathing below.

Meditation

I choose to meditate – a lot. At least an hour a day. But I was not always as successful with it as today. I felt that sitting on my pile of unprocessed emotions, made meditation not work. Bach flowers the same. Craniosacral therapy also not. A myriad of alternative therapies simply had little or temporary effect. Hindsight, I believe it was because I sat on a dung pile of unprocessed emotions. After decluttering my emotions, I can meditate much better now and am onto it – twice a day – every day!

Meditation allows you to observe, slows down your monkey mind, helps with overthinking and massively impacted my tendency to procrastinate and ruminate over everything, hugely beneficial to everyday life.

Studies have proven that meditation changes the physiological structure of the brain, affecting emotional regulation, fear, anxiety and self-perception. Meditation training improves a wide range of willpower skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control and self-awareness. It dramatically affects the all-important “hypervigilance” mode of all TMS suffering by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and quietening the sympathetic nervous system. This basically means it allows the nervous system to recover by switching from ‘fight or flight’ mode into ‘rest and repair’ mode with ease…which is where we want to be.

Research even shows that meditation regulates our body’s vibrational frequency, bringing it back into balance with that of the earth, which when out of sync can cause distress, anxiety, insomnia and a suppressed immune system – literally invading our ability to heal.

The most recommended practice is heart-focused breathing to balance heart rate variability (scientific indicator of stress):

A. Heart Focus: Focus your attention on your heart area. Breathe in through your nose for a count to six (or more) and breathe out through your mouth for a count to six (or more). You may find that placing your hand over your heart helps you maintain your focus there.

B. Heart Breathing: Now imagine while breathing that you’re doing it through your heart. Picture yourself slowly breathing in and slowly breathing out through your heart area.

C. Maintaining your focus and breathing through the heart area leads you naturally into a state of ease (parasympathetic nervous system, rest and repair).
The scientific term for this simple and quick tool is psychophysiological coherence.

The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), also called the anabolic, or rest, repair and rebuild nervous system, is responsible for digestion, elimination, and regulating repair of the body. The PNS also stimulates immune function at night during sleep and PNS function is closely linked to the timing and release of many key immune hormones and specialized immune messengers.

The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is often called the “fight or flight” nervous system because the SNS prepares the body to fight or to flee from danger. When the SNS becomes the dominant branch of the nervous system, blood is shunted away from the internal organs and into the muscles and periphery of the body to facilitate action. The SNS is also referred to as the catabolic nervous system because when it is active, there is increased utilization of many nutrients and hormones and also greater tissue destruction is generally taking place. It is important to realize that when the SNS is dominant, the functions of the PNS are proportionately shut down. If this happens too frequently, many vital SNS functions become labored and vital PNS functions are relatively inhibited.

Stress is, without a doubt, a major player in a variety of health problems—including pain, anxiety, depression, to cardiovascular disease to IBS or even Tinnitus. So what’s the best approach to combat the epidemic of chronic stress?

Here’s where Heart Rate Variability (HRV) comes into play. Heart rate variability (HRV) is the beat-to-beat change of the heart and a measure of the Autonomous Nervous System (ANS). The ANS has two main branches. The sympathetic nervous system that controls fight or flight. Think of this as the gas pedal in your car. It will speed up your heart rate or increase sweat. The parasympathetic nervous system is the brake. It helps you to rest and digest or feed and breed. It will slow down your heart rate. If you are hunting, for example, the sympathetic nervous system permits you to be attentive and focused. But when eating, you want to turn that off so that the nutrients can be absorbed. The parasympathetic nervous system helps you do that and also sleep, so you can recharge your batteries.

Imagine for a moment that instead of the PNS spending most of the time in the body’s driver’s seat, the SNS were running the show. Instead of a body in a generally relaxed state; digesting well, pumping blood via low pressure, with a heart rate that only speeds up when needed, you have a body existing in a perpetually hyper-aroused state. Always exhausted but never able to sleep. Heart racing, but unable to physically exert. Wanting to have an orgasm, but unable to become sexually aroused. Such is the nature of SYMPATHETIC DOMINANCE.

Most people in the West are too revved up. There is too much gas or sympathetic nervous system. It is part of the reason that we have trouble sleeping and stress-related health issues. It also explains digestive issues as the SNS is still active when we eat and digest.

A low HRV represents too much stress in the system. A high HRV, a flexibility of the nervous system and a potentially optimal response to stress. Our emotional state impacts HRV. HRV patterns shift with different emotions. Positive emotions show a smooth pattern in heart rate. Stress or frustration show a more choppy pattern.

Heart-focused breathing is essential in balancing and training a nervous system that that spends too much time in fight or flight. The more time we spend in a coherent, parasympathetic state, the more resilient we become.

The Heartmath Institute has done groundbreaking research on the intelligence of the heart, the importance of heart-focused breathing and offer a variety of devices to track the HRV. Heartmath video