#10 - Wandering around Vagus - November 2023

Exploring our Regulated Sympathetic Landscape

Welcome to Month 10 of Wandering Around Vagus, a paid monthly subscription series exploring the Vagus Nerve + Polyvagal Theory.

I’m Tina Foster of Foster & Flourish, the creator and guide of Wandering Around Vagus.

A few quick notes to help you orient within our pages:

• If you’re new, or need a review, here’s the link to the START page.

• You can find last month’s post (our ninth) on savoring and SIFTing in the ventral state here.

• Monthly & Supplementary Posts + Recordings can be accessed by topic from the navigation bar atop the Wandering Around Vagus Homepage.

• All past posts live on the archive page.​

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What we’ll do this month

This month, our focus returns to the sympathetic state. The last time we spotlighted sympathetic, was #4 with the exploration of our ways of being in fight or flight.

Since our last look at sympathetic covered the jittery survival end of the sympathetic spectrum, this month we look at regulated sympathetic occupying the calmer, cooler (but still active) end of the spectrum.

In regulated sympathic, we can move fast, feel rushed or even a bit nervous, but our nervous system remains manageable and relatively balanced. We have extra energy to take care of everyday activities that require extra “oomph” and those involving just enough “healthy stress” to keep us motivated and on target.

By the end of this 13 minute audio you’ll have a better sense of:

• what the sympathetic system does, the role it plays in life

• what it means and how it feels to be in regulated sympathetic

• how the regulated sympathetic state lives in our imagination and is imprinted into our body memory

• what it’s like to inhabit the space of our regulated sympathetic system

• how to stay connected to our regulated sympathetic landscape

We’ll review the broader sympathetic system before narrowing our lens to spotlight regulated sympathetic and how it looks and feels as a landscape.

Imagining an experiential state as an inner landscape helps us understand our nervous system’s “take” on our outer environment and situation at any given moment, and how those outer circumstances are mirrored in the inner atmosphere our nervous system creates to help us navigate our outer situation and environment.

The general role of the sympathetic system

The sympathetic system is a subsystem of the autonomic nervous system that regulates our automatic processes. Keep in mind, these processes aren’t occurring under conscious control, though we might be consciously aware of them at times.

During activation, the primary roles of the sympathetic system are:

• Preparing the body for stress-related activity, both regulated or survival (fight-or-flight)

• Activating the fight-or-flight response in threatening situations

• Slowing or stopping digestion and other processes less essential for stress-related activity

• Increasing heart rate

• Dilating the pupils

• Dilating muscles

• Increasing alertness

• Relaxing the bladder

• Helping to maintain homeostasis

In helping to maintain homeostasis, the sympathetic system:

• works in balance with the parasympathetic nervous system which slows body functions and relaxes the body

• activates the sweat glands to cool the body

• regulates the heart rate

We’re mobilized into action no matter where we are on the sympathetic spectrum or whether we’re in a regulated or a survival state. The differences between regulated and survival sympathetic are rooted in how active we are and how much stress we feel.