Hey, Cadre! Today we’ll be talking about your nervous system - what it is, what it does, signs you need recovery, some simple tools for regulation, and building resilience to stress. See you soon!
Josie Jade introduces herself, greets the audience, and states that she will be talking about the nervous system. This orients viewers to the video's focus and purpose.
Josie shares her college background, minors in neuroscience and biology, and why she finds the nervous system fascinating. She frames the topic as timely and important for mental and physical health.
This section defines the nervous system, its components (brain, spinal cord, nerves), and its influence on movement, breathing, digestion, immunity, and stress responses. It introduces the sympathetic and parasympathetic states and the goal of flexible switching between them.
Josie describes how today's constant stimulation can trap us in a sympathetic 'fight or flight' state and why that becomes problematic. She emphasizes that stress is normal but highlights that we can train our nervous system to recover faster and regain baseline after stress.
The host shares simple practices to calm the nervous system, including prolonged exhales, walking without a phone, stretching or shaking out tension, and grounding through the senses. Each tool is presented as an accessible way to reduce arousal and return to parasympathetic balance.
Josie lists cues that suggest you should use these practices—racing thoughts, tense muscles, shallow breathing, irritability—and explains the energy cost of prolonged fight or flight. She closes with encouragement to try the tips and a brief farewell.
All right, hi everyone. I hope everyone has had a good day so far. This is Josie Jade. I am a health coach and I am also a co-founder of a beverage brand called Charm Social Tonic. Yeah, I just wanted to hop on here and talk a little bit about the nervous system. So in college, I just graduated recently this spring and I studied business, but I was also a pre-medicine student and I was really fascinated in neuroscience. So I actually got a minor in neuroscience and then another minor in biology as well.
But Something that was just so fascinating to me is our nervous system. And it's really exciting as well because there is so much more research being done on the nervous system and so many more studies coming out talking about how much it really does impact us on a daily level, how it impacts our mental health, how it can even impact our physical health, and overall well-being. And so it's really valuable to understand, okay, what is our nervous system? How is it impacting us? And what are some ways that we can stay in tune with it, observe it, and help to regulate it?
So first off, we'll just start off with, okay, what the heck is a nervous system? Like, I've heard of this, but what even is this exactly? And your nervous system is essentially your body's communication network. And it includes your brain, your spinal cord, and your nerves. And it influences everything from your movement, your breathing, your heart rate, digestion, and your stress responses. And it even has a close connection talking with your immune system as well. So it influences a whole bunch of stuff in your body and it is constantly responding to the environment that you are in.
And it helps your nervous system is helping to relay to your body whether you feel safe or if you feel alert and overwhelmed. And so essentially your nervous system has two main states that it will flip between. So you have your sympathetic nervous system and then your parasympathetic nervous system. Your sympathetic state is a state of fight or flight and when you have a lot more energy and alertness. So that is essentially the state that will help you run away from a lion if we were living in the wild and had predators.
And then your parasympathetic nervous system is your state of rest, digest, and recovery. And neither of these states are bad. I just want to preface, we really need both. Both are very important and the goal is to have great flexibility between the two. Things get wonky when we get stuck in the sympathetic nervous system state. And it is pretty easy to do in today's day and age. We have a lot of stimulation constantly coming in. We have screens, we have our phones, and lots of noise, lots of things happening all at once.
And Sometimes our nervous system has no idea what to do with that. And so it is just constantly in a state of fight or flight. And this becomes problematic when it gets stuck in that stress state and it doesn't come back down to the rest and digest state. The good news is we can train our nervous systems to have more resilience. from flipping from when we get stressed because stress is inevitable and it is okay. It is a normal part of life and a normal part of being human. But we can train our nervous system to recover quicker from those stress states and come back down.
So for example, say we get stressed, we come way up here. And sometimes we get stuck way up here, even after the stressful event or situation has passed. Even hours could go by and we're still up here if we don't learn how to regulate ourselves and how to bring ourselves from up here back to down here. And we can use a set of tools to help us come from up here to bring it back down here. And over time, we can actually train our nervous systems, train ourselves to continue to bring that gap. So we go through something stressful, we come up here, we can train ourselves to come back down to the baseline.
And over time, we can get better and better at it. And have greater resilience, be able to move back down to the baseline in a quicker amount of time. So after practice, you can, after the stressful situation, you'll be up here. And then after practice, instead of spending hours up here or being stuck up here for the rest of the day, we can use tools to bring us back down here. So then maybe like 15 minutes to an hour after the stressful situation, you might have been up here and now you're down here.
And simple tools like having longer exhales when we breathe, that is a trigger to our nervous system that we're safe and that we're okay. Because usually when we get stressed, we get more short of breath. But if we prolong our exhales when we breathe, it helps to calm our bodies down and say, hey, you're safe, you're okay. So that's one Little tip. Another tip is going for a walk outside preferably, but if it's just a treadmill, that is fantastic too. And try to not bring your phone if possible.
Try to just have as little stimulation as you can and just allow yourself to relax and fully unwind, letting all that extra stress go. That's another tool. Stretching can also be another wonderful, simple practice to just take a moment and stretch for a little bit. Separate yourself from whatever you've been doing and just come back into your body, move, and even moving, animals shake when they're stressed. And that is a form of getting rid of excess energy and it helps to bring their nervous systems back to the parasympathetic rest and digest state.
Another thing could be grounding yourself through your senses. So closing your eyes for a couple minutes and just coming back into your body. What do you smell? Do you taste anything? Do you feel What temperature is the air on your skin? What are you feeling in your body? Just coming back into the present moment can help to ground yourself and bring you back from that stress state to a parasympathetic state. And some signs that you may want to use some of these tools include having a lot of racing thoughts, feeling tense in your body, tense muscles, tense in your shoulders and neck, feeling irritable.
If you notice that you have shallow breathing, if you feel exhausted, or if you're having difficulty relaxing, trying some of those little tools and creating a sort of little practice where you can come back to yourself and breathe even if it's just for like a breath or two, that can still make a huge difference and completely flip the trajectory of your day. Because when you are in that fight or flight mode for a prolonged period of time, it takes a lot of energy to be in that state. And you will probably feel depleted at the end of the day or in the middle of the day because It's really taxing on your body, but if you can bring yourself back and ground yourself and just take a moment to come back to yourself, it can really, really help change the trajectory of the day.
Yeah, so I hope that some of these practices and these little tips were helpful and I hope that you all have a wonderful rest of your evening. Alright, thanks guys.
