Dr. Jay Wiles

And then on the other side, we have the parasympathetic nervous system.

So when we think about parasympathetic nervous system, the way I was taught about this in graduate school is para is like a parachute.

It helps to bring us down.

The whole intention behind the parasympathetic nervous system is our rest, digest, or relaxation response.

But again, I like to think of it more as a way of conserving energy.

So mobilizing energy, sympathetic nervous system, conserving energy, parasympathetic nervous system.

And we have both of those kind of working together, not just antagonistically.

They're not just like this seesaw where we turn one on or we turn one off.

And that's where a lot of people get this wrong is that there's a misconception that I turn on my stress response and I can turn it off or I turn on my relaxation response or I can turn it off.

It doesn't work that way.

It's not a seesaw.

They actually work together.

And so kind of taking a step forward now to HRV and kind of how this relates to everything is that we can actually gain insight or window through a biometric, which is heart rate variability, which actually looks at that autonomic nervous system and whether or not it's actually making true adaptations and is resilient, or is it lacking in flexibility and potentially causing us some significant harm?

The nervous system is having to respond to millions of processes at any given moment.

So it's having to make adaptations at any given moment, again, to keep us in that state of homeostasis.

Otherwise, we become dysregulated and we experience what's called allostatic load.

In other words, our nervous system can't keep up with all of the input.

It's basically too much.

It's too taxing.

And so therefore, when we look at heart rate variability and the distance between successive heartbeats, and I think that actually probably I should offer that definition now and explain why those distances relate actually to dysregulation or regulation of the nervous system.