Are You Over Stimulated?

Do you find it hard to lose weight, sleep at night, or squeeze out a poo? Are you hungry all the time, have a bad tummy, or highly stressed? Maybe your sympathetic nervous system is overly dominant.

The sympathetic nervous system gives us our “fight or flight” response.

Fight AND flight?

You know the feeling when you’re scared, being attacked by a mountain lion, or see a parking officer writing a ticket for your car. It speeds up heart rate, releases powerful chemicals, dilates pupils, constricts the ass, relaxes the bladder, releases sugars into the blood, all to get you the hell out of there.

The parasympathetic nervous system is our “rest and digest” response such as the stupor a mountain lion dips into after devouring a fresh kill. This does the opposite, slows heart rate, increases digestion, and relaxes your bottom so you can poo.

We can be more dominate in one of these nervous systems due to our life style.

So if your sympathetic system is on overdrive all the time you can start to see why you may have trouble sleeping, digesting, losing weight and of course pooing.

What can we do to combat this?

Here are some points to focus on:

• Learn some mental management strategies you can imply when you’re stressed, i.e. recognise when you are getting stressed or mad, stop, take a deep breath, and bring yourself back to “centre”, refocus.
• Listen to chilled out relaxing music.
• Take time out and do something fun that you have always wanted to do.
• Eat less carbohydrate! Less processed food, more whole food. Lean meat, fish, nuts, fruit n veg, just like our mate the mountain lion.
• Avoid high volume, high intensity training. This means avoid training super crazy hard throughout the entire week.
• As far as training goes, either try training at a low to moderate intensity throughout the entire week OR train high intensity for only part of the week. I prefer the balls out, spew on the floor type training so I only have to do it a few times a week! Gives me more time for other stuff like writing this article for you lovely folks. Now you know why I like to train so hard!
• Take deep full breaths! It’s amazing how shallow some people breath, especially when we are stressed.
• Relax, relax, relax…did I say relax?

Good luck!

Bettsy

For more info on this topic please don’t hesitate to contact J-Bro Betts at bettsy@junglebrothers.com