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If you think to any past experience of deep emotion, your breath would have shifted in response. Be it a gasp in shock, a sob in grief, or an inhale in excitement, your breath would have changed. Those heart racing, eyes leaking, belly flipping things we call the feels, it all changes our breath. In What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Woo, she explains how some emotions can be safe to feel while others are not. While she was addressing this in relation to trauma, I really believe we have all experienced conditioning around what is socially acceptable to feel and what is not. There are those emotions that elicit shame, or are simply less desirable or attractive. As a generalisation, women often feel unable to express anger, and men belittled for feeling scared. With the recent spiritualist movement, toxic positivity surfaced telling us all to feel, ‘good vibes only,’ and ‘think positive,’ to avoid facing what might be uncomfortably real. However, this isn’t real. We as humans have complex access to a wide range of emotion and when we dull, deny or suppress certain emotions, we mute our capability to feel anything to its full potential.

Feeling Safe

Before we begin diving deep into the complex world of our emotions and our mental health, I invite you first to establish what regulation (safety) feels like in your system…

• Notice your feet resting against a solid surface
• Notice your breath and the rate it is moving into and out of your body
• Look around the space and notice your proximity from the walls, windows and doors

Notice now, how present, settled or calm you feel. There is no right answer, this is just an opportunity to notice.

The Autonomic Nervous System (your engine)

Every emotion lives somewhere on the scale of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS controls the switch on and switch off, of every gland and therefore hormone in the body. It governs every bodily function from sleep to sex and like most parts of our primal evolution, its key role is to keep you safe and alive. Its main and only goal is to protect you from the things you have experienced as a prior threat. Some of these threats can be learnt behaviour, such as the screech of breaks signalling danger from a memory of a survived car crash. Some of these threats are inherited into our DNA and passed on through generations, most immediately from our mother and inter-generationally, further along our ancestral line. While we seek to be in a place of regulation and with it, emotional balance, this system is designed to scan the environment, people’s facial expressions and body language on autopilot, to assess if there is anything that might require us to move out of regulation and act. Any life experience that causes you to feel unsafe, is called ‘disregulation.’ We can become disregulated due to any rupture in our mental, emotional, or physical world.

At it’s very basic level, like an engine, your ANS has the ability to both speed you up and slow you down. Branching off into two main responses, that of activation and deactivation…

The Sympathetic Nervous System (your accelerator)

Our sympathetic nervous system has confusingly nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with activity. This is our battery pack, our accelerated, ‘doing’ state. It is commonly referred to as fight, flight, freeze, yet this is only its extremest, most heightened expression and unfairly often judged by this alone. Society, education in schools and any health mag you read, warns of the detrimental effects of being in this state. Undoubtedly yes, too much time spent here, at a heightened level, moving you into a stressed, fearful, panicked response, is detrimental to health and yet it does serve us as well.

What does this activation feel like in my system?

In safety, within what we call your ‘window of tolerance,’ activation feels like alertness, drive and focus. It is experienced every time you breathe in, your heart rate along with adrenaline and cortisol increases. Without these hormones we wouldn’t get up in the morning, we wouldn’t feel excited, or motivated to do anything. Life, might arguably, be a bit boring.

In disregulation and if experienced too much, these stress hormones can begin to surge. Our heart rate can become irregular, we begin to over breathe quickly and our digestive system slows down. If experienced for a prolonged period of time, research shows our ability to experience higher cognitive thinking goes offline, chronic pain develops in the muscular tissues and our testosterone levels decrease, meaning our libido disappears. Essentially here, our body decides what is essential for immediate survival and everything else, is considered unimportant.

It is in the sympathetic nervous system that anxiety lives, with a fast and urgent voice, demanding that you act now. If you feel yourself prone to being in a place of panic and fear, you may spend a lot of your time in too much of an activated place, in a sympathetic response.

If you struggle to speak up for yourself, set healthy boundaries, or suffer with people pleasing, an injection of activation in your life may be the medicine you may want and need. Keep reading for guidance on how to do this…

The Parasympathetic Nervous System (your brakes)

Otherwise known as rest, digest, repair however, most of us haven’t been taught resting to be necessary, or productive in the same way ‘doing’ has. This part of you ANS is more to do with pausing and ‘being’. It is in this state that our internal organs digest our food and we begin to repair on a cellular level. Not in a luxurious way, but in an essential-for-survival kind of way. Yet you can have too much of a good thing. Excess parasympathetic energy results in shut down and collapse, with feelings of confusion, apathy and resignation. Ideally, we would spend our day fluctuating between these different branches of our nervous system. Going for a run would require sympathetic activation and going to sleep would require parasympathetic deactivation.

Panda displaying parasympathetic vibes

What does deactivation feel like in my system?

In regulation, deactivation feels like complete rest. You can experience it with your exhalation, as your heart rate and out breath slows, your muscles relax and body temperature begins to drop.

However, too much energy on these brakes, in a prolonged parasympathetic state, results in fatigue, lethargy and shut down. It is in this heightened level that depression lives, with a slow and heavy voice, telling you that there is no point. Breathing becomes shallow, in the upper chest along with irregular pauses. If you struggle to feel joy, find no interest in life, or struggle with self esteem, you may spend a lot of your time in too much of a deactivated place, in your parasympathetic response. A boost of healthier sympathetic energy into your body may help you shift.

If, in contrast, you struggle to slow down, put your feet up or if a pause feels triggering to you, deactivation may be needed in your life to create harmony and balance.

By now you may have an idea of where you frequently orient in your own nervous system and know that we will experience both ends of the spectrum. What we look to find, as often as possible, is balance. Easy, free flowing movement along this spectrum, depending on the experience. We want permission to feel sad and tired in response to the appropriate life circumstance and we look to feel excited and happy at the relevant times too.

Up & Down

The trouble with frequently orienting out of balance and into either an anxiously activated or depressively deactivated state, is the turbulence between the two can gain a ping pong momentum. Bouncing from feelings of over stimulation to complete shut down and spiralling from a bout of self hatred to worrying your boss is mad at you. The stress hormones are craved much like an addiction when we feel low and a higher high is necessary to bring us out of that rut. When we oscillate up and down, much of our time in these extremes, the body is desperately trying to reach homeostasis and a regulated place of safety. The good news is, you can achieve this place of balance and you already have everything you need to get started.

Your breath

We explored how every time you breathe, you are subconsciously shifting along this intelligent scale of your nervous system. Each breath in, is an activation (called up regulation). Each breath out, is a deactivation (known as down regulation). Breathing is a bodily function that can be both unconscious, and conscious. When we breathe without thought, we react to our life experiences, when we meet the breath with consciousness, we can intentionally shift our physiological state and with it, our emotional and mental wellbeing.

A therapeutic treatment plan

While most will require a blended approach of therapies, I am here to share the ways the breath could help…

For the stress heads: If you are reading this and you are feeling that you live in a constant state of stress and need deep regulation brought to your nervous system, put the coffee down. Instead, functional breathing will become your very patient best friend. This as a method you can explore by breathing slowly, deeply and lightly through the nose. I also facilitate breathwork coaching for nervous system regulation on a one-to-one basis, because everyone has a unique nervous system and requires a tailored approach.

For the can’t-get-out-of-bed-head’s: If, while reading, you are thinking, YES I need more energy, more activation and excitement in my life, I suggest becoming curious about conscious connected breathwork. You can experience one of my virtual breath journeys on demand, or you can join me for weekly classes and monthly events. The best way to stay up to date with all of that is via my newsletter.

For the human beings: You may notice, as many of us do, that you require a blended approach. There will be times in your life when you need to be activated, you require a boost, an acceleration and times when you need deactivation, to rest and to put on your breaks. The beauty of the breath is you can trust it can bring you to exactly what you need. If you wish to explore more, group, private and corporate sessions are available with me and know that you are at the right place. You are not alone.