Parasympathetic nervous system what is it and why is it so critical to your
well-being? Coming right up
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and
hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. So I've done some
videos on stress before so you could look those up as well but in this video
I wanted to focus on the parasympathetic aspect and explain why that is so
critical and how many things it influences in the body the
parasympathetic nervous system is a part of the autonomic nervous system the
automatic nervous system that does all the stuff that you don't have to think
about all the part of your brain that balances and manages and brings
everything back to homeostasis so the thing to understand about the
parasympathetic is that it's opposing branch is called the sympathetic or
fight/flight and that's the part that typically takes precedence because
whenever we have an emergency that has to be dealt with first
so the parasympathetic is sort of the one that allow is allowed to do its
thing when there is no imminent danger when there's no perceived danger these
are like two parts two halves on a seesaw so whenever one goes up the other
one goes down it's like you're driving a car you can't speed up and slow down at
the same time and the sympathetic and parasympathetic oppose each other and
the sympathetic always comes first so now we're going to talk about all the
functions maintained by the parasympathetic that are only allowed to
come through and only allowed to sort of do their thing after we settle down a
little bit so the parasympathetic is also known as feed breed or rest digest
so it slows things down it sends the blood it reallocates the blood away from
muscles and to your vital organs can perform internal functions it slows
down the heart it slows down the breathing it relaxes muscles and it
produces vasodilation so in my previous videos on cold hands and feets we've
talked a lot about this but the thing to understand is that if you can create
vasodilation and warm your hands and feet then you're activating your
parasympathetics that is handling all of this that we're going to talk about so
there's these are not isolated things they all work together when you increase
one you increase all of this so it can have extremely profound far-reaching
influences on benefits on your health the first thing that we want to talk
about is digestion and all of these functions digestion immune system and
ableism and reproduction are 100% controlled by the parasympathetic the
sympathetic has no influence over these except that it can shut off the
parasympathetic so in order for these to be driven forward we have to have
parasympathetic activation so digestion first part is to produce hydrochloric
acid in the stomach and that's to break down the food to break down the proteins
we need to have also enzymes both in the stomach and in the mouth and in the
small intestine because they further break down the food if we don't break
down the food we can't absorb and utilize it peristalsis is the movement
of the gut that the your intestines are kind of squeezing there's muscular
activity to squeeze the food so it moves forward through the gut that's called
peristalsis and absorption also doesn't happen by itself it's an active process
it uses energy it has to first break the things down and then it has to use
energy and they're just the right combination of things to pull it through
that intestinal membrane so that we can use it immune function is controlled by
the parasympathetics and this would be primarily your
cell-mediated part of the immune system that's your white blood cells the things
that fight off infections that combat toxins and and foreign invaders in your
body and Nabal ism is the process of building things up
catabolism is breaking down and Nabal ISM is building up and your body tries
to do this all the time so growth and repair and healing the replacement of
tissue the regeneration and growth of tissue and any form of healing is a form
of anabolism and can only work through the stimulation of the parasympathetic
nervous system and then of course reproduction fertility libido erectile
function all of those things that are necessary for humans to reproduce are
completely controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system also any
form of lubrication or secretion whether it's its vaginal or in the stomach or
tear ducts any form of secretion is also a parasympathetic so if this doesn't
work when these don't work or don't work well enough now we have things like
heartburn indigestion constipation malabsorption malnutrition even if we
eat reasonably well even if we eat the right things if we can't break it down
properly we may not utilize more than 50% of the critical nutrients in there
one especially is b12 that if we don't have enough hydrochloric acid in just
the right environment then we may not absorb very much of that at all same
thing with calcium and vitamin D and so forth
immune function of course colds and flus and infections when do people get colds
and flus they get them when they're stressed they get them when their bodies
are stressed by sugar so we've talked about this in previous videos that the
cold and flu season coincides with the sugar and stress holiday
season every year that's not a coincidence
students get their colds and flues around finals because they're stressed
they eat more sugar they don't sleep enough they're mentally agitated and
tense so the parasympathetic nervous system drives the immune system when
we're stressed we shut off that function the anabolism growth and repair so now
we could have wasting we could have atrophy and just slow healing in general
because we don't have enough for that parasympathetic function reproduction
sterility lack of sex drive erectile dysfunction all of these things go
together and that's what we have to understand that if you improve one of
these by learning how to slow down by doing breathing exercises relaxation
exercises then you don't just do it to affect one symptom you affect the entire
sim system the entire system is affected because they run on the same fuel they
run on the same stimulation so I hope that was helpful that you understand a
little bit more about how far reaching the parasympathetic nervous system is
and that it's the stress that shuts down that parasympathetic function so if you
can improve it just a little bit you can improve all kinds of different things
and for some people like when they have cold hands and feet they might try to do
some relaxation exercises and they do it for a week and nothing happens but if
something has been there for a long long time you might have to be patient and do
it for three months six months nine months before you can really start
shifting the dominance and the habits in the body and in the nervous system
please share this with people because these are things that you can help
affect most people take antacids and tums and proton inhibitors and they take
cold and flu medication and they they take
drugs over-the-counter drugs to treat the symptoms when there is a simple
solution you just need to understand these principles and be patient and work
with them if you knew this channel and you enjoy the sort of content make sure
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much for watching