Why Nervous System Imbalances Drive Our Behaviors | Arielle Schwartz, PhD

Yeah, I think one of the things that really strikes me about like the language of the nervous system is that it's very clean, right? We look at some of the language that we use in psychology and in mental health, it can sometimes be pathologizing because we're oriented towards symptoms, diagnoses, what is wrong, honing in on these, these problematic factors, grouping them into clusters and so forth. And then we look, we can sometimes get caught at looking at ourselves or looking at our clients through those lenses that are kind of saying, check those boxes, okay, you've got major depressive disorder, check those boxes. You have PTSD or OCD or whatever it might be. And when we look through the lens of the nervous system, and as we'll speak a little bit more about with the applied polyvagal theory, we actually see that what underlies most of our mental health imbalances or diagnoses or symptoms are nervous system imbalances. When we can attend to the nervous system we can actually look at. Well, most of us have some degree of nervous system habits or tendencies to be a little bit more sympathetically driven, fight, flight, light driven, or maybe to be a little bit more, as you said, attentive to other people, appeasing, pleasing, caretaking as a way to maybe not settle into self. Or maybe it's a nervous system imbalance that takes me into chronic fatigue or inflammation states or a sense of collapse, withdrawal and isolation. But our nervous system can drive these behaviors. And again, there's a, there's a non stigmatizing way that when we look through the lens of the nervous system, it starts to help us have some more compassion. This was the best way that my body and my, you know, kind of whole psyche as, as infused into embodiment, knew how to help me survive. Sam.