3 Quick Exercises to Calm the Nervous System

Quick Overview of our Nervous System

Your nervous system is a complex network of nerve cells that carry messages to and from the brain and spinal cord to our other body parts.   More specifically, the autonomic nervous system is responsible for regulating the body’s unconscious actions, which include the sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) nervous systems.   These two systems are equally important and work to balance each other out.  The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) keeps us safe by responding to danger cues in the environment and readying the body to respond by either fighting or fleeing the situation.  The parasympathetic nervous system has the important job of re-calibrating and relaxing the body once we no longer need to be activated and ready to jump into action.   

Counseling to Calm the Nervous System and Address Anxiety

Many people seek mental health counseling because of symptoms related to an unregulated autonomic nervous system.  At times we all experience “false alarms” in our environment, that launch our sympathetic nervous systems into a highly activated state.  Sometimes when our bodies become activated we have difficulty bringing ourselves back into a balanced or relaxed state.   For some, our bodies may become hypersensitive to environmental cues and thus our body ends up spending too much time in the sympathetic response state.  

Anxiety is a term we use to describe the physical symptoms of the sympathetic response, especially if we have a difficult time returning our bodies to a relaxed and regulated state.  Anxiety is related to the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) response and creates many uncomfortable symptoms, including panic attacks, accelerated heart beat, shallow breathing, palpitations, increase in sweat production, or tightness in the chest. 

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (Source:  www.nimh.nih.gov), anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental illnesses in the U.S., while also being one of the more treatable conditions via therapy. 

3 Quick Tips to Calm Your Nervous System at Home

Counseling is a great way to work towards better control and management of our autonomic nervous systems.   Counseling is a good option if you struggle with anxiety management or are unsuccessful trying simple tools to manage anxiety at home.   

Below, are 3 quick tools that can help activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm anxiety after an activating moment. 

1.     4x4 Breathing

Breathing is a simple way to exert control over our autonomic nervous system and can activate the parasympathetic nervous system within seconds.   In 4x4 breathing, we extend our inhales and exhales to 4 seconds each, making sure not to rush.   Another method is called Square Breathing and involves holding our breaths for 4 seconds between our inhales and exhales.  Square breathing involves a total of 4 parts – a 4 second inhale, a 4 second hold with full breath, a 4 second exhale, and a 4 second hold with empty lungs.   The more repetitions you can do, the more you support the parasympathetic response.   I recommend my clients complete at least 10 rounds of 4x4 breathing and then check-in with their bodies to see whether a few more rounds would be helpful. 

1.     Mindful Awareness of the Body

In mindful awareness of the body, we take a curious and non-judgmental approach to the physical sensations that are happening inside the body.  In this exercise, we remind ourselves that our physical symptoms are not dangerous, and are not labeled as “good” or “bad.”   Start with a few rounds of mindful breath.  We gently turn our attention inward, and scan our bodies for sensations.  Once we notice a sensation, we try to describe those sensations in detail (again, avoiding a description of good or bad).  This detailed description may refer to energy, tingling, tension, tightness, warmth, cold, sharp, dull, large, small, etc.  We can move deeper into the exercise by using shapes and materials to describe our sensations.   We continue to breath throughout the exercise and use our breaths as a grounding tool that we can always return to if we get lost or distracted from the exercise.  

2.     Imagining a Calm Place

In this exercise we find a quiet space and allow ourselves 3-5 uninterrupted minutes of self-care.  Again, after a few rounds of grounding breath, we invite ourselves to imaging a calm scene, either from our experiences or our imagination.  We spend 30-45 seconds going over each of our 5 senses (sight, smell, touch, hearing, tasting) and pay mindful attention to what our senses are noticing in our calm scene.  After 3-5 minutes of imagining being in this calm place, we turn our attention towards the body, and spend 30-60 seconds noticing the internal state of calm.