Zen and the Art of Nervous System Maintenance

One aspect of taking care of yourself that’s often overlooked is nervous system maintenance. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll define your nervous system as the body’s opportunity/threat scanner.It’s constantly pinging your environment, looking for clues that you’re either safe (and should focus on finding good stuff, like food, mates, or season two of Beef) or you’re in danger and should focus on hightailing it out of there or preparing to fight).When this system works, you spend your energy wisely. You make good decisions. You respond rapidly to change and take appropriate and proportionate action when called for.When your nervous system is out of whack (that’s some fancy neuroscience jargon thrown in to impress you), you over- or under-react to threat. You either miss clear danger signals, or (more commonly) respond to every glance, utterance, email, or traffic light as an invitation to extend your adamantine claws and fight.In other words, what can look like an objectionable personality (what Bob Sutton refers to, in organization development jargon, as an “asshole”) is often based on a miscalibrated survival imperative.And that’s good news. We don’t know how to cure “asshole.” But we know a lot about repairing and maintaining the nervous system, to restore it to a state of sensitive harmony with its environment. And it starts with the body.The Diagnosis: Unchecked Allostatic LoadYour allostatic load is how much stress your body is carrying at any given time. When it’s high, it takes very little additional stress to catapult your nervous over the red line — the point where your nervous system flips from “thoughtful and strategic” to “eat or get eaten” mode. Not a great look at team scrums or standups.Allostatic load is a big problem in our modern environment, because all the things that lower it are in short supply for many of us: birdsong, the smell of fresh soil, long vistas, singing and dancing around campfires, and picking insects out of each other’s fur. (All, interestingly, associated with safety and the absence of predators.)Those classic stress-reducing triggers have been replaced by stress-inducing ones, like being surrounded by thousands of strangers, enclosed spaces, artificial lighting, and bad covers of classic rock songs.So your allostatic load, which in your ancestral environment would generally have reset to close to zero by the time you awoke, can just keep climbing. Day by day, little prods and annoyances ratchet up the stress, with no relaxation in sight. From morning to night on any given day, your allostatic load climbs like the foam on top of boiling spaghetti water.That’s why an innocent word or otherwise insignificant event can put you over the red line: because you were already doing the hokey-pokey right at its edge.The Treatment: Daily Nervous System MaintenanceBecause stress is a physiological response, working with your body is the fastest way to bring down your allostatic load. The most accessible lever is your breath.Usually, our bodies breathe automatically and unconsciously (which is nice, because it leaves you free to sleep without worrying that you’ll forget to breathe and die during the night).But breath is unique among your body’s automatic processes in that you can bring it entirely under your conscious control.The hack is simple: spend 1 minute, 3 times a day, breathing consciously, with the out-breath taking slightly longer than the in-breath.As you breathe, lightly scan your body with your mind, noticing any tightness, holding, discomfort, comfort, and fatigue.Try it now and see what changes for you.*hums Jeopardy! theme song*You back? How’d it go?Now, I’m not claiming that this simple practice, which you can do for free anywhere and any time, is the total cure for a miscalibrated nervous system struggling under a ginormous allostatic load.What I am claiming is that you can use it to move away from the red line, so you have more “fuse” between trigger and boom.And if you make this a regular practice, like brushing and flossing your teeth, you can begin to restore your nervous system to a healthier state over time.There are many other strategies, but reconnecting with your body and stimulating your relaxation response on a regular basis provides the physiological foundation upon which those other strategies can build. Without it, you’re just trying to think your way out of a problem that has become immune to better thinking.Once you’ve regulated your nervous system on the physical level, you can then address the next steps on your journey to buoyancy: inoculating your mind against unhelpful thoughts, seeing a bigger picture, and engaging in your world with wisdom. All stuff we’ll explore in upcoming issues of The Buoyant Leader (so subscribe if you want to keep exploring this stuff with me :).