Prepare, Signal, and Fire: Nerve Supply
Your nerve system is responsible for every activity in your body. Your body’s activity is determined by the activity of the nerve system. The activity of all cells, tissues and organ systems in your body is reflected by the sensitive nerve system.
Language of the nervous system are the signals sent over nerve fibers, the nerve impulse. The nerve system acts in many ways as a bundle of wires, which transmit signals. Your body will always act in harmony when every nerve fiber within the bundle emits an impulse or fires. The signals that reach their destinations are similar to on/off switches, which regulate and integrate all activity in your body.
In other words, nerve impulses can be fired in order to develop and strengthen the routes along which they travel. Repetition of phone numbers or the movement of free throws can strengthen the nerve pathways, making them more powerful. This is how nerve fibers form new pathways, or strengthen existing ones, to enable us to move, learn, feel, think, and to do so, we can also create new pathways.
Vital: Nerve Supply to your Brain
Each part of your body gathers millions of bits of information, which then travels through the spine to your brain. The input from the nerves to your brain is crucial for brain function. The fifth cranial nerve is the most important sensory input for the brain. It’s the line that divides brain activity. It shuts off if sensory information is blocked from the brain by an injury beyond this point. The brain would remain functional even if the same injury occurred below this level.
Also, even though we all know the brain functions as a supercomputer and controls the body’s activities, our understanding of the neurochemical supply to the brain means that it also runs its own nerve supply. The brain is the engine of your body. However, your body provides fuel for your brain. Moving is Dr. John Medina’s brain center at Seattle Pacific University. He explains movement in Brain Rules 2008, “acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress.”
Motion, Nerve System, and Sixth Sense: Proproception
The sixth sense of your nervous system is called proprioception. This is how your sixth sense helps you place your feet to walk and how the batter swings a bat in the direction of the ball. Your body’s sense of place in space is called proprioception.
Surprisingly, most of the information that travels across your nervous system’s surface is beneath the surface. Furman and Gallo’s textbook Neurophysics and Human BehaviorAccording to researchers, trillions of bits and pieces of information flow through the nerve system. We are conscious of approximately fifty information at any given time. Behind the scenes, the constant evaluation of movement information via the proprioceptive portion of your nerve system works similarly. However, it has an important impact on your health.
Wellness chiropractors are the authors of this program. As chiropractors have known for over 100 year, they know firsthand that proper function of nerves and proprioception is essential for good health. Roger Sperry PhD was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine. He is best known for his brain research. He described the importance of proprioception’s contribution to essential elements of nerve supply to general health in this way. “Better than 90 percent of the energy output of the brain is used in relating to the physical body in its gravitational field. The more mechanically distorted a person is, the less energy available for thinking, metabolism and healing.”
Every moving animal species needs to have an unconscious knowledge of its movements and positions. It’s essential to the survival of basic human functions like finding food and water and shelter. The proprioception portion of your nerve supply regulates your body’s ability handle stress.
Stress and Your Nerves
It is the nerve system, which is ultimately responsible to manage stress. There are three types of stress: mental, chemical and physical. Stress is caused by unhealthy choices regarding fuel, spark, and air. However, your body has a common reaction to stress.
Hans Selye, a physiologist from Denmark was the one to first coin the term “stress” just fifty years ago. Your body releases stress hormones, which is what makes stress response (the “stress response”) so distinctive. Your nerve system controls the release of stress hormones, as we will see below. Your nerve system sends hormones to your body when it perceives stress. The sympathetic nervous system controls these signals. Your body’s system-wide stress response is initiated by noradrenaline and epinephrine (also known as norepinephrine or norepinephrine), and cortisol.
You can fight or flight, rest and repair, or your nervous system.
As being awake and falling asleep are distinct and different states, stress and being in a healing or repair state are distinct and separate. The hormonal release from the nerve system triggers stress and causes symptoms such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other stress-related reactions. It means that you need to tear down tissue, prepare to burn energy and get ready to move. As the body prepares to act, blood is sent to muscle, away from organs. Blood pressure rises when vessels contract, digestion slows down, and immune reactions weaken. This stress response is often called fight-or flight or flight stress. It’s controlled by the sympathetic nervous systems.
In response to stress (or anything else your body considers a threat), your sympathetic nerve system will be activated. Your body responds intelligently to threats by preparing for fight or flight. You will feel the effects of your sympathetic nerve system even if you are not experiencing a stressful situation.
However, this comes at a price. To deal with a threat, you must stop the activity of resting and repair. Parasympathetic nerve systems, which are dedicated to repair and rest in the body of the sympathetic nervous system, is an alternative system.
Parasympathetic nerve system activity is involved in digestion, relaxation, and reproduction. This system is activated when your body needs safety to heal, repair tissue and produce children. You need to be in a place of rest and recovery to allow your body to heal quickly and effectively.
Over the last twenty-five years, research has demonstrated how profoundly your nervous system can have on two functions “super-systems”Inside your body: Your immune system and your hormone system.
How your Hormones and Immune System are connected to your Nerve System
The intimate relationship between nerve and immune systems was not understood by mainstream science until about twenty-five years ago. The benefits that chiropractors brought to patients’ nerve systems were evident for years before. This is an example of the lifesaving effects chiropractors had on patients during 1918’s flu pandemic.
Communication from the nerve system can influence almost every immune organ within your body. The activity of your nervous system controls the activities of all immune organs, which includes your network lymph nodes and your bone marrow.
Stress can also make it more likely that you will get sick. Stress hormones are released when you go into an aggressive fight or flight mode. You are more likely than others to feel stress and to become more susceptible to sickness.
Research continues to show how the nervous system, hormone system and immune system work together. To read more, check out these links on this growing field of psychoneuroimmunology.