Thursday, December 15, 2016

12 Tips to Tune Your Nervous System (article)


As you have probably gathered from my previous posts, I'm all for fine tuning your nervous system and this article from Anthony Mychal gives 12 tips to do this.

It's written from a physical performance output point of view but it holds true whether you're main focus is competitive sport, casual training or even just to perform at work at the highest level you can.

Some of these I've touched on before in various details and some I haven't so please give the original article read here but my biggest takeaways are:

- Enhancing performance is about balancing stress and recovery.

- The autonomic nervous system has 2 main branches with the sympathetic division which "excites"  (fight or flight response) and the parasympathetic that "inhibits" (rest and digest).

- You need to know when to excite and when to inhibit but most people stay "on' even when you don't need to be so you're going to run out of gas even though you're not physically expending any energy.

- Understanding the balance between the 2 sub-systems is is critical for optimal function

- A bad day energy wise is fine, it's simply you're body telling you "I'm just not up to it today and I can't really handle much stress today' so you HAVE to adjust what you'll spend your spoons on at work, at home and at play.

- A big event, physical or mental, requires big recovery so whether you have a huge presentation you just finished or a triathlon competition run on the weekend, make sure you plug in some recovery to get you back to a parasympathetic state.

- Don't hop from diet to diet, training program to training program and try and get a routine of some form. Every decision we make induces some form of stress and without a routine, even deciding what shoe to put on first creates minute stress. I am full of routines for the most part making decision making as little part of my life as I can. My morning ritual is fully ingrained in my brain because when the alarm goes off at 5:10am every bloody morning, the last thing I want to do is make 10 decisions before I even get to work!

- The easier you can kick your parasympathetic nervous system in and relax, the better you'll recover from any stress event meaning you can perform them more frequently. Yes you can induce high levels of stress which is how we adapt to workload but you need to be able to handle that stress and get rid of as well to get the balance mentioned above. Turning off is just as important as turning yourself on. If you need to turn on semi-regularly for sport or work then you if you stay turned on then you don't have another level to go to, and stress overtakes the body and you get sore, tired and sick. You HAVE to learn ways to disengage from reality and taking work and emails home with you isn't the way to do it. You hear of athletes sitting at home playing video games and gambling - this is what they're doing, just not in the best way they could be! I watch Friends and eat.

- Being able to nap is a GOOD thing and there's no medals for who can get up the earliest, do the most work, and stay up the latest. If you're struggling to sleep then you're in for a host of issues, GUARANTEED! I'd nap 2 - 3 times a week during the day and I want to nap right now before a school pick up but I gotta get this done!

- Train hard, recover harder! High intensity activities are great to do but again you need to make sure you are recovering even harder so that can manage the fatigue from them throughout the other parts of your life (work, family etc). Doing more bootcamps and group classes, both that have a ridiculously high emphasise of building fatigue (and not much else), is not the best idea.

- Reconsider your schedule and try and pace high stress events as evenly as you possibly can taking into account work, family and other outside interests. Trying to squeeze your weekly training into 2 days might not be a great idea with a 20 hour plane trip the next day!

- Celebrate special occasions especially after times of high stress as this can actually provide you some "closure" or a 'brain dump" of sorts that can 'officially" end the event and you can move forward rather then talking about it for weeks after it, what could I have done better etc. It's done - move on.

- Don't change all the time as new stimulus provides new stresser and when a stresser is new, it induces far more stress then after you've done it 5 times. Remember that great idea you had to start running again? That run around the block almost killed you but now you can do 5 laps before work. That's what new versus old stress looks like.

- It always comes back to breathing with me doesn't it! Learning how to breath correctly can control your heart rate and circulate oxygen around the body which will keep you in a parasympathetic state for longer assisting with all the things I just said above. And also if you don't breath, you die! A bit dramatic but you get the idea...

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