Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Get To Know Your Nervous System (Part 1: Back to the Basics Series)

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 101

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In this first episode of the “Back to Basics” series, where I dive into the core of what drives anxiety and depression: your nervous system. When you better understand how this mind-body system works you can work with it towards healing.

You'll learn:
→ What the nervous system is and how it functions
→ The difference between regulation and dysregulation
→ How stress and past experiences shape your responses
→ A simple framework (the nervous system ladder) to understand anxiety, depression, and survival states

Key Takeaways:

  1. Your nervous system isn’t working against you—it’s trying to protect you. Your symptoms are messages, they’re protective.
  2. When you understand your nervous system, you can move from self-blame to self-compassion, realizing that everything you experience makes sense.
  3. Take a moment to reflect—what stressors, past or present, are weighing down your system? Does where you find yourself on that nervous system ladder most often make more sense when that comes into view?

By the end of this episode, my hope is that you walk away with a deeper understanding of why your symptoms make sense—and with a new glimmer of hope for healing.

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Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here now. Let's dive in. 

Today. I'm really excited to be kicking off a new series that I am titling back to the basics of navigating anxiety and depression through a nervous system lens. I have been running this podcast for a while now, and I have had such an awesome opportunity to dive into so many different and interesting conversations in regards to anxiety, depression, mental health, lifestyle habits, all of it, and it can be really, really easy to get caught up in these new and novel conversations. But I think there's also so much strength in coming back to the foundation of what do I mean when I tell you that we help people navigate and heal anxiety and depression through a nervous system lens? What does this look like in practice? One of the core purposes of this series, is to really help you be reflective on your own experience, your own symptoms, your own healing journey, to help some of these pieces fall into place. 

So even if you are somebody who has been listening to this podcast since day one, there is going to be a new way that I teach some of these basic concepts that might trigger a new aha moment really help some of these pieces to fall into place for you in a new way. And in this series, you will see me get into the weeds of some of the sciency concepts, because I do feel like it is important to not completely dumb down the science. I think it's important for me to empower you to understand your physiology and your psychology, and most importantly, the interplay between the two in a real way that also allows you to consume this information in other places and have context for the terminology. But also my goal here is not to make you a neuroscientist or a doctor of psychiatry. It is to help you understand your physiology and your psychology in a really practical and actionable way, to support you on your healing journey. And so I am going to be using a lot of analogies, a lot of examples, to help these concepts make sense for you and your life. 

And for this first episode, I figured the best place to get started is to answer the question of, What is your nervous system. And for the sake of this particular podcast, why is it so important to understand this mind body system in healing anxiety and depression. So your nervous system has many different parts, but today I am going to talk about the main branch that is responsible for your stress response and your ability to regulate and that is called your autonomic nervous system. So you can think about your nervous system like your body's command center. It controls everything from your thoughts and emotions to your heartbeat and your digestion. When we say mind body connection, we are talking about your nervous system. When we say we're healing through a mind body lens in a really holistic way, we're talking about understanding and working with your nervous system. Your nervous system, it is constantly scanning your environment for safety or danger and then determining how to respond. The number one goal of your nervous system is safety and survival. It is trying to help you navigate and adapt to your different life circumstances. And this complex system includes your brain, your spinal cord and your nerves. 

So we can think about the way that our nervous system works is that it is constantly sensing, interpreting and responding to the world around us. It is sensing meaning. It's taking in information. It's interpreting, what does this information mean? And it is responding. What action maintains safety? Is that to fight is that to flee, fawn, rest, shut down, all of these different survival responses. We will go into a lot more depth of later on in this series. So a really simple example is, let's say you hear a noise. Your brain interprets that as a knock at the door, and then your nerves tell your body to get up and move to answer the door. But let's say instead you hear a noise, and instead of a simple knock at the door, it is a banging on your door at two in the morning. Well now you might just not so casually, get up to go answer the door. Now there's a fear response. You might actually stay in bed and not move and not go answer the door. You might reach for your phone, but. So it's sensing. It's taking an information, it's interpreting what does this mean, and it's filtering the information through basic survival instincts and your past lived experiences, which is why two people might respond very differently to the same situation. They might interpret the same situation very differently, because their past lived experience has some different filters. 

Now your autonomic nervous system has two primary branches, the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. And maybe you want to think about these things like the accelerator or the gas pedal on your car and the brake pedal. So the sympathetic nervous system state, this is your Go, go, go, go, go, versus the parasympathetic state, which is that, hey, let's slow down. We can move slower. We are calm. It's okay to be right here. So your sympathetic nervous system state, this is your activated state. It's your fight or flight mobilizing. Get it done. Gotta go right now. And what's important to understand is that your physiology changes in real and measurable and automatic ways, meaning, when this state gets activated, you don't get to choose, that your heart starts to beat faster, that your breath rate becomes more shallow, that your muscles tense up, or that your pupils dilate, or you become more tunnel visioned. That just happens, and when it does, it changes the way that you perceive and respond to the situation at hand. Same thing when your parasympathetic nervous system state is activated. This is sometimes called your rest and digest, or your social engagement state. This is where you can feel calm and present. You have a sense of, I'm safe enough, I'm capable. I feel connected and supported. Also here, your physiology changes when you are in this state. This is when all of your internal systems are operating optimally. So your digestion is happening optimally. You are able to get high quality sleep. Your immune system is operating at the best that it can. You can access relaxation or genuine fun play connection when you are here and when we're having conversations about our nervous system. Those are terms, I think it's really important to be familiar with other terms that you hear on podcasts and books or wherever. Are terms like a regulated versus a dysregulated nervous system. 

So what does this actually mean when you are in a regulated state, your body and your mind are in a state where you feel safe and you are able to respond appropriately and effectively for whatever is happening when we are regulated, we move through the world with a sense of agency, a sense of calm. We're able to meet challenges and know that we can move through that with our coping skills. But if you are in a state of dysregulation, this is when your body is kind of stuck in a place of activation or shutdown, even if there isn't an immediate threat present, we are constantly jumping to worst case scenario. We find ourselves maybe chronically feeling stressed or anxious or on edge, or feeling so overwhelmed to the point of shutdown, feeling like you just don't have the energy you want to but you can't. All of these things are indications of being in a dysregulated state. 

So now that we've spent a few minutes talking about the nervous system through more of a sciency lens, I want to give you more of a conceptual understanding of your nervous system. So think for a second about your nervous system like a filing system, and in that filing system, it stores all of the information gathered throughout your life on what has kept you safe and in connection, versus what has been unsafe, stressful or hurtful. And maybe you want to visualize this as an actual old school office filing folder that you pull out that drawer and you see a million files. Maybe you think about it more like a file folder on your computer, but in this file folder, you have little red flags or red tabs on all of the situations where you were unsafe or you were hurt, you didn't get your needs met, you felt embarrassed. It is marking those situations as really, really important to remember, and now here today, in your. Present day life, your nervous system is operating a little bit more like a lighthouse. So I want you to imagine a lighthouse, and it has that beam of light that is scanning the horizon, except your nervous system's beam of light is scanning your life. It is scanning inside your body. It's looking at basic health markers and the thoughts inside your head. It is scanning outside into your environment, and it is scanning in between relationally. So we often say the three places our nervous system looks for safety or danger cues is inside, outside and in between, inside ourselves, outside our environments, sensory input, clutter, toxins, safety, and then in between. Relationally, what's the quality or safety in the relationships in our life? And so this lighthouse, it's scanning inside, outside and in between, and it is looking for things that are either safe or potentially threatening, and it's constantly checking back in with these files for how to interpret these things. Is this familiar? Is this familiar in the past? Was this similar to a thing, a person, a situation that felt safe or unsafe, and it is constantly scanning and asking, Is this safe? Is this safe? Is this safe? Is this familiar? Is this familiar? Is this familiar? And anytime something pings as familiar in any way in your present to a situation in your past that didn't feel safe, it sets off alarm bells that say, Hey, pay attention. Remember when this feels familiar to that time when dot, dot, dot. And maybe the familiarity comes from a facial expression, a location, a time of day. Maybe the familiarity comes from an internal feeling of maybe not being good enough, or feeling judged, or any number of things, but anytime something feels familiar, oh, it raises an alarm. 

So one thing that I say a lot and believe with every fiber of my being and have seen to be true over and over and over again with the hundreds of clients that we have supported is that all of your symptoms make sense, your anxiety and your depression, the activation or the shutdown that you are experiencing in your life makes sense based on your past lived experiences and current life circumstances. And there is a moment that each of our clients has, and that I know many of you have had in listening to this podcast, where that clicks for you too. Oh my gosh, maybe I'm not so broken. Maybe I can heal. This makes so much sense. I never put things together in this way, and I hope you have more of those moments throughout this series. 

So just quickly reiterating this inner security system, your nervous system, it is constantly scanning for safety or threats, and when it is regulated or well calibrated, it responds appropriately, alerting you when necessary, but then allowing you to feel safe and at ease the rest of the time. But when it is dysregulated. It can get stuck in high alert or shut down, reacting to everyday stressors like it's an emergency, or feeling like, oh, every little thing is just too much regulation. So again, redefining these terms, regulation is our ability to experience distress or stressors and return ourselves back to a grounded state, back to a place of feeling safe enough. Notice I did not say that regulation is feeling good, calm and grounded all the time. Regulation is your ability to resource and reset after stressful events. And when you are regulated, it means that you are spending more time in this resourced state than not. And dysregulation is when we become stuck in states of activation or shut down. When we become symptomatic, the alarm bells are going off. We are employing different survival or coping strategies, both physiologically, our blood is pumping to our extremities, our heart is racing, you know, that fight or flight response, but also psychologically, we have patterns of thinking or behaving that are aimed at getting our needs met without returning to regulation. 

And what I think is one of the most helpful things to understanding and working with anxiety and depression through this nervous system lens is understanding that there is a predictable flow that our nervous system takes through our various states. And this is something that polyvagal theory refers to as the autonomic hierarchy. And I usually teach. This with visuals. But because this is an audio only medium, I am going to describe the visual to you first, really let you bring it to your mind and visualize it, and then I'm going to go through my spiel of helping you contextualize where and why. In my practice, we often understand and work with anxiety and depression, not as these separate things, but simply as different phases or different states of survival mode. 

So I want you to imagine a ladder just bring to mind like a simple ladder, two lines on the side with connecting lines in between. And on the ladder there are three color blocks that kind of fade into each other. From the top to the bottom of the ladder. At the top of this ladder there is a big green block. Then in the middle of this ladder you see yellow, and at the bottom of this ladder is a red color block, green at the top, yellow and red. So this green color block represents your regulated nervous system state. I use the words regulated and Green Zone pretty interchangeably here on the podcast. That middle block the yellow one, this represents your sympathetic state. This is your state of activation, mobilization, fight or flight. This is where anxiety is experienced. This is your yellow zone. And I'm intentionally giving you all of the words that I frequently use to describe each of these states, so you know what I'm talking about when I use the words activated, mobilized, fight or flight, anxiety, yellow zone, this is what we're talking about. And then at the bottom you have the red zone. This is a state of shutdown, of disconnection and immobilization, and this is where you experience depression. I am going to expand on each of these states in next week's conversation. Today, I just want to briefly introduce you to them. 

So now, bringing this visualization to mind, I want you to imagine that you are standing at the top of that ladder holding a bucket. Now this bucket represents your unique nervous system's carrying capacity. We understand that a bucket can only get so full before it overflows or gets too heavy to pick up. Now, what comes into your bucket? The thing that weighs down your nervous system, we'll call it the water, the water in the bucket. This represents stressors, and these stressors can be past or present. They can come from external things like your environment or relationships, or internal things like your health or your thoughts. And another conversation in this series, we'll do a deep dive into the bucket, what we call the stress bucket. But for right now, you are standing at the top of that ladder, holding this bucket when it is light, when the stress load on your nervous system is light, it is easy for you to stay at the top of that ladder. But as the bucket gets heavier and heavier with daily life stressors, with past life stressors, this bucket gets heavier and heavier, and it pushes you further and further down the nervous system ladder, and the first stop is the yellow zone. Evolutionarily, when we encounter real or perceived stressors or threat, we turn to this activated flight or fight response. Usually, we first want to flee. We want to avoid stressors or threats, but if we can't avoid them, then we move towards them, which is our fight response. So we're in a regulated state. Ooh, real or perceived stressors come in, our nervous system activates. Our bucket gets heavier, it pushes us into that yellow zone. Now, if those stressors don't resolve by fighting or fleeing, if they last too long, or if more stressors Keep coming, keep coming into the bucket, into the bucket, and this bucket gets heavier and heavier and heavier. It pushes us down into that red zone when your nervous system becomes overwhelmed or exhausted. It moves you into a protective shut down state. 

And there is something really incredible that clicks for our clients when they understand symptoms of activation and shut down what they previously labeled anxiety and depression in this hierarchy, because it's not that anxiety, this activation in our system and then depression this, you know, quieter, more shut down, more exhausted, disconnected symptoms. They're not completely separate things. They are just different intensities of our nervous system's survival response. And for example, many of our clients resonate with having the. Variants of having a lot of high anxiety days, go, go, go, go, go, get it done, get it done, get it done, and then they kind of shut down into exhaustion. They often label it burnout, but what it really is is your nervous system can only stay in that go, go, go, high, high, high state for so long before it becomes metabolically exhausted and moves into a shutdown state. So some people might label it burnout, freeze, overwhelm or depression. What we also see a lot of is individuals who have struggled with anxiety for a really long time, but they come to work with us because they see their anxiety starting to feel more like depression, because maybe they got really good at managing their anxiety symptoms, but now they don't know what to do with these new depression symptoms. And so they end up being clients of ours, and they have this aha moment of like, oh yeah, because you can only stay in that yellow zone for so long before the system becomes exhausted. And so they're at that point where their system is shifting into shutdown, to exhaustion. 

And now bringing that colored nervous system ladder back to your mind for just one more moment, reiterating that regulation does not mean that you stay and you live in that green zone all the time. Having a regulated nervous system means that you can flow flexibly up and down that nervous system ladder, returning and settling in that green zone as your baseline. Having a dysregulated nervous system means that you are spending more time in your yellow or red zone than you do feeling regulated when you identify with the label of anxiety or depression. It is likely because your baseline state, because of your past lived experiences or your current life circumstances, likely a combination of both, your nervous system feels like it has to be on high alert, go, go, go all the time, or it's become so overwhelmed to the point of disconnection and shut down being the most advantageous way to engage with your world. 

Nothing about you. I don't believe anything about you is broken. I believe that your nervous system is working exactly as it's designed to do, that it has done its absolute best to keep you safe, to get your needs met. Up to this point in your life, it is done the best that it can with the skills that it was, that it learned, that it was taught, and as it starts to learn better and learn different, it can start to do better and to do different, but the first part of healing is making sense of your symptoms, is being able to access a little self compassion to drive your healing journey, some curiosity, and my hope is that understanding what your nervous system is these different states, and then exploring that in deeper ways throughout this series that you begin to have moments of pause of oh, this makes sense, and that is where that glimmer of hope for healing comes from. 

All right, let's wrap up today with three tangible takeaways. 

Number one is that your nervous system is designed to keep you safe, not to make you miserable, your symptoms are messages of the Hey, pay attention. Remember when or this is all too much. We're overwhelmed. And when you learn to speak the language of your nervous system, when you learn how this mind body system works, you can start to work with it instead of feeling so against it. 

Number two is that understanding the basic function of your nervous system and the primary states and how you move through them, in my opinion, is key to moving away from self blame, moving away from that story of brokenness and instead into a Place of self compassion, curiosity, which is immeasurably valuable in your long term healing journey. And then 

TAKEAWAY NUMBER THREE is an invitation to be reflective when I talked about the nervous system ladder, and then when you think about your life and what's in your bucket, the past unresolved stressors that you carry around, the current stressors that you encounter in your daily life. Think about that load for a minute. How heavy Do you think it is carrying that around all day every day? Does it maybe make sense that you are stuck in a state of activation or shut down? Maybe imagine it this way. Would you walk up to a 300 pound weight at the gym and try to pick it up without any training? No, probably not. And you likely know that if you tried to pick it up too hard or for too long, you'd probably get hurt. You would injure yourself. But here's the thing, many of you are walking around with a 300 pound life. Yeah, that nobody taught you how to carry so of course, it feels heavy. Of course it is wearing you down. It is not because you suck. It is not because you are not good enough. It's not because you were born this way, or just have to learn to settle for this life. And our approach to helping clients, it involves holding space for them to temporarily put down their load, unpack it, look at it, and then to intentionally choose what they want to keep carrying, or to build up the skills to carry the heavier parts of life that they might not be able to put down. It is about taking a whole human, whole life approach to healing, and that starts with understanding the role your nervous system plays. 

All right, friends, that is it. Thank you so much for continuing to be here week after week, for courageously stepping into your healing journey. I am sending so much hope and healing your way, and I'll see you next week. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

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