How to Retrain Your Nervous System After Trauma

As a therapist, ‘the nervous system’ is a phrase that’s become part of my everyday vocabulary. While it’s an increasingly familiar term for everyone else, there’s still some confusion about what it means. More to the point, what does it have to do with your mental health?

What is Your Nervous System and What Does It Do?

The nervous system includes the brain, the spinal cord and a super-duper complex system of nerves. These nerves reach out to the far extremities of your body, right to the end of your fingers, enabling sensations, movement, and autonomic functions like your heart rate, breathing and digestion.

The brain and the spinal cord make up what’s known as the central nervous system. You can think of this like a motorway. The nerves reaching out all over your body are like a bunch of A and B roads.

The nervous system has a communication function, sending messages back and forth between our body and our brain. We tend to assume the brain controls the body, but it’s actually a two-way system or ‘bidirectional relationship’. This means the brain tells our body what to do and the body returns the message by sending instructions back to the brain.

These messages control things like our thoughts, our movements, and our learning. The nervous system is especially important when it comes to regulating our emotions. That’s why you’ll hear therapists talking about it all the time!

The Nervous System After Trauma

The nervous system is extremely complex. It’s biologically driven, meaning it’s shaped by our physiological and neurological experiences.

If we extend the motorway analogy, we can imagine it as a high-speed transport system carrying hundreds and thousands of messages. Sometimes there’s a clear run with things getting through quickly and easily. At other times, there are traffic jams, meaning there’s a delay or miscommunication.

But what causes these traffic jams? The messages going back and forth can be positively and negatively influence by your feelings. A thought you have or the way you interpret something in your brain can impact how you feel in your body and vice versa.

For example, if you think something is dangerous, the message sent through your nervous system to your body is ‘prepare for danger’. Conversely, if your body is tense and alert, the message sent back to the brain tells it there is something to be on the lookout for.

If you’ve experienced trauma, these processes will naturally be influenced by what you’ve been through. It’s not uncommon for people who have experienced trauma to hold a lot of stress and tension in their body. Often, they will spend a lot of time feeling anxious and on edge, and this emotional state influences the messages delivered through the nervous system.

How to Retrain Your Nervous System After Trauma 

The good news is we can learn techniques to regulate our emotions and retrain the nervous system. Many of these techniques focus on regaining control of our body using simple things like breathing exercises, movement and stretching. They help by sending soothing messages to our nervous system. When these messages reach the brain, they tell it things are okay, that we’re calm and there is nothing bad happening to us right now.

Read 5 Ways to Regulate Your Emotions to learn more. In the meantime, here’s a short calming exercise you can practice…

1.      Find a comfortable quiet space and sit with your feet firmly on the floor.

2.      Begin to notice your breathing.

3.      Focus on the in-breath, counting slowly to four.

4.      Then, focus on holding the breath as you slowly count to four.

5.      Slowly exhale whilst counting to four again.

6.      Gently repeat these steps until you begin to feel calm.

Find Out More

If you’re struggling with any of the things described in this article and you’d like an expert to help you heal and recover, please get in touch. Alternatively, subscribe to The Trauma Toolbox to receive my insights and tips straight to your inbox every month. I also share lots of mental health education via Instagram.