What you can do about Sympathetic Dominance

What can I do about being stressed?
Lots of things! There are always little changes you can make to help decrease the stress load on your body and decrease your sympathetic dominance. It is easiest to look at it through the 3 key pillars of physical, chemical and emotional health.
Some physical changes you can make:

1. Posture. When we are stressed and carrying our tension in our shoulders, it causes poor posture. It causes our shoulders to sag forward and our head to drop forward, increasing load on our neck and spine. This also changes the way that we breathe, making us always breathe from the top of our lungs like we’re being chased. Simply pulling your shoulder blades together will open your chest and lift your head, creating desired posture and decreasing tension in your muscles.
2. ½ foam roller/rolled up towel between your shoulder blades. Like working on your posture, winding down at the end of the day by lying on a ½ foam roller is a fantastic way to calm down your system. It opens through your chest, stretching those tight pecs, and encourages correct head and neck posture.
3. Red lenses. The blue light emitted by our devices (TV’s, phones, computers etc) is quite disrupting to our system, it can wind up your stress response without you even realising and can interrupt normal sleep patterns. A few things you can do to counteract this- every phone now will have a blue light filter option in the settings, it is a very good idea to turn this on especially at night a few hours before you go to bed. You can also use red lenses/glasses in the same way, wear them a few hours before bed to help calm your system to get ready for sleep. 
4. Get adjusted. Rib adjustments are a key component in changing breathing patterns, which helps calm the sympathetically dominant system. Having your nervous system in good working order and free from interference is a big step you can take to decrease your sympathetic wind up. Getting adjusted by a chiropractor has many benefits, come and have a chat to us to find out more.

Some chemical changes you can make:

1. Gut support- probiotics and bone broth. When you are sympathetically dominant, your body doesn’t prioritise digestion, as this is a parasympathetic action for when you are relaxed. So, supporting your gut and helping it to digest efficiently is very important. Including probiotics and bone broths in your diet are great for encouraging healthy bowel function and allowing your gut to heal from any impairments caused by the sympathetic dominance. 
2. Magnesium supplements- a good quality magnesium supplement will also help counteract the effects of chronic stress. Magnesium is used in the body to do almost everything on a cellular level, and deficiency can be another stress on your body. Magnesium deficiency can cause feelings of tiredness, weight gain and muscle cramps. 
3. Withania supplements- withania is a supportive herb for your adrenal glands, particularly useful during periods of high stress.
4. Decreasing ‘crap’ food- no preservatives, highly processed foods etc. If your body is working hard to process some of the foods you eat, it can become stressed. Try to eat whole foods as much as you can (veggies and fruit, proteins like meat and legumes) and avoid highly processed food (i.e. anything in a packet with more than 4 or 5 ingredients), or anything with sugar (or glucose etc) as one of the first 3 ingredients.

Some emotional changes:

1. Calming the busy brain- write ‘to do’ lists. It is very easy to become overwhelmed with everything we need to get done, and it is impossible to relax when you are thinking about it all. Find what works for you to help get the planning out of your head! Whether it is using a calendar to make sure no appointments get missed, or writing to do lists, do whatever you need to, so you can stop the endless planning in your head and actually switch off.
2. Guided meditation. Once you have written your to do list, try a guided meditation. There are lots of free ones you can try on YouTube, this is our favourite: https://youtu.be/Zljg2ptExHc. These are great for calming your brain at the end of the day, and helping you relax and switch off from your stress, at least for a little while.​

3. Confronting, or at least acknowledging the biggest stress in your life. For many people, they are stressed by a lot of little things adding up, or one big issue they can do little about. It is a good idea to sit back and look at your life and where the stress comes into it. Maybe this will give you some perspective and allow you to let go of some of the smaller stresses, or at least name where your stress is coming from and give you the chance to compartmentalise or separate it from your everyday life. 
4. See an emotional support professional- counsellor, kinesiologist, best friend over coffee – a  shared is a problem halved. If you need any additional support to work through your emotional stresses, please seek help. It’s OK to not be OK, but often reaching out for help can seem too hard. See your GP, call a helpline, text your mum, whatever you need to, to support yourself through whatever you are going through. 

Some of these changes are easier to implement than others, so start with the easy ones and work on the rest one at a time. Make sure you pick some from each section (including the scary emotional one, it’s kind of the most important), and strike that balance within your own life. Most people notice some pretty big changes within the first two weeks, some will have to stick with it for a bit longer. Thanks for taking the time to learn a bit more about how you can improve your health; the more that we know about how our body functions and why we’re in the state that we’re in, the more we can do about it.