The Autonomic Nervous System and Health

How healthy we are is directly related to the health of our autonomic nervous system, or ANS. Our ANS is the part of our nervous system that controls those functions that we almost always have no conscious control over and that are essential for life. The ANS regulates the heart, breathing, circulation, body temperature, digestion, metabolism, and hormones, among other vital functions.

The autonomic nervous system is divided into two parts, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS). The SNS is our fight or flight response, how much stress our body experiences without us being consciously aware of the stress. It also regulates how well our cells get oxygenated and absorb nutrients. The PSNS controls the many systems that we need to live, such as breathing, heart rate, circulation, digestion, metabolism, elimination and so on.

The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is our day nervous system. It gives us the energy we need to live daily. The PSNS works more at night, when we need to be regenerating our cells and tissues for the next day.

The autonomic nervous system must be in balance at all times. In a healthy person, the PSNS and the SNS are in balance. When we are not able to deal with stress in constructive ways, the SNS is often too high, and the PSNS is too low. Since the PSNS controls many systems in our body, then all of those systems are depressed and not functioning optimally.

When we are dealing with acute and/or chronic illness, our autonomic nervous system is out of balance. At Comprehensive Naturopathic Care, we can assess your autonomic nervous system in a 7-minute test that gives us a printout of how your SNS and PSNS are functioning. Then we can re-test you from time to time to see how the therapies are working. The test, called a Heart Rate Variability test, monitors 448 heartbeats while you are lying and while you are standing.

What we see from this test time and time again are people whose SNS is too high, meaning too much inability to stay healthy in the face of stress, and whose PSNS is too low, meaning that the systems of digestion, metabolism, elimination and so forth, are depressed and not functioning as well as needed to promote health. If you have a depressed PSNS it doesn’t matter how many supplements you take. A depressed PSNS will get in the way of supplements working optimally. In addition, a weak PSNS can often be a sign of prolonged emotional stress that is hidden or prolonged stress on the body from tooth and jaw problems.