Unlocking Your Body’s Elite Performance

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

—William James,
America’s first psychologist

The Autonomic Nervous System—Why Dogs Don’t Get Ulcers but People Do

Have you ever wondered why your dog can just shake off the stress of someone knocking at your door and fall back asleep but the argument you had with your spouse keeps you up at night? It has to do with the fact that animals are instinctual and one with their environment. They respond to the stress, deal with it, then return to recovery or resting state.

As humans, we have the unique feature of consciousness. Not only can we assess a threat and deal with it, but we can also filter the stress and put a label on it, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not. We can make the choice to hold on or move on; we can decide to worry about the future and create anticipatory stress. This ability to create a story in our mind is a subject that you really want to understand in order to know how to implement changes in your life. Failure to learn how to manage your stress leads to chronic disease, which works against your desire and ability to perform at an elite level.

The beginning of your journey to decode performance starts with understanding the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). This is critical because extensive research has validated the notion that an imbalanced ANS leads to chronic disease, impaired cognitive function, and suppressed immune response. In other words, an imbalanced ANS is interference that prevents the performance you desire.

The ANS is a network of cells that controls the body’s internal state. It regulates and supports many different internal processes, often outside of a person’s conscious awareness, to maintain internal balance, which is referred to as homeostasis. Hence, it’s your external monitoring system, measuring and sensing what you are facing, in order to keep you in balance with your environment.

Let’s start with some basic anatomy. Your nervous system consists of two main aspects:

• The central nervous system: This consists of the brain and spinal cord.
• The peripheral nervous system: This contains all of the neurons outside of the central nervous system.

The ANS is part of the peripheral