Nervous System Regulation and Warmth in the Holiday Season
November is a busy time for many of us. Between preparing for holiday events, managing end-of-year projects, and transitioning from fall to freezing temperatures, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Accordingly, this month we want to share some ways to slow down by regulating our nervous system and highlight how warming up plays a role in our wellness. In this newsletter, you can expect:
🍂 An overview of how our nervous system works and ways to self-regulate.
🍂 Tips on how to recognize when your nervous system is dysregulated and what you can do about it.
🍂 Information on heat therapy and how it benefits our bodies and minds.
🍂 Insight into how sound healing can help heal the nervous system.
🍂 Details on new acupuncture pricing for 2025.
🍂 A review of IHWC’s participation in October’s Trunk or Treat!
Congratulations to Sierra!
Sierra won our monthly random subscriber drawing for a free float or infrared sauna session here at Integrative Health and Wellness! We will be reaching out to you by email to get you set up and ready to relax!
Understanding Your Nervous System: The Key to Inner Calm
From our Hypnotherapist, Jennifer Larkins
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) is a dynamic network that manages our body's unconscious processes and plays a key role in our emotional and physical wellness. It has two main branches: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
The SNS, often referred to as our "fight-or-flight" system, activates in response to perceived stress or danger, preparing the body to respond quickly. It raises heart rate, increases muscle tension, and sends more blood to essential organs to help us cope with immediate demands. While this response is valuable in the short term, chronic activation can lead to issues like anxiety, fatigue, and even physical discomfort.
On the other hand, the PNS is known as the "rest-and-digest" system. It encourages relaxation, slowing the heart rate, reducing blood pressure, and supporting digestion and immune function. When our nervous system is balanced—meaning there’s a healthy back-and-forth between the SNS and PNS—our body enters a "regulated" state. This state promotes resilience, enhances focus, and helps us navigate life’s challenges with calm and ease. Learning to engage the PNS can help reduce stress, increase resilience, and support emotional and physical well-being.
5 Self-Regulation Techniques to Try This Week
4-7-8 Breathing Method
- This simple technique involves inhaling for 4 seconds, holding for 7, and exhaling for 8. This pattern calms the body by stimulating the PNS, lowering heart rate, and encouraging full lung engagement. Practicing this breath can quickly shift you into a calmer state, perfect for easing stress or preparing for sleep.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation
- The vagus nerve helps activate the PNS and regulate stress. Gentle exercises like humming, gargling, or deep diaphragmatic breathing stimulate this nerve, promoting relaxation and helping your body shift away from fight-or-flight mode.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)
- PMR involves tensing and then releasing different muscle groups throughout the body. This technique promotes body awareness, reduces tension, and helps shift the nervous system into a relaxed state, ideal for reducing anxiety and physical stress.
Grounding Exercises
- Standing barefoot on natural surfaces like grass or soil promotes a sense of stability and calm. This reconnects you with the earth, allowing the body to discharge built-up tension and stress.
- Techniques like placing your feet on the floor and focusing on the sensations in your body can anchor your awareness in the present moment. This can be helpful in regulating emotional responses and preventing stress from escalating.
Visualization of Safe Spaces
- Visualizing a calming, safe space—such as a beach or a forest—can calm the mind and soothe the nervous system. This visualization technique activates the PNS, making it easier to release tension and bring peace to your inner world.
Each of these techniques strengthens your resilience to stress, teaching your nervous system to adapt and recover, which leads to a more balanced emotional state over time.
How to Recognize When You're Dysregulated (and What to Do About It)
Signs of nervous system dysregulation often appear as irritability, restlessness, tension, racing thoughts, fatigue, and even brain fog. This can make it challenging to manage emotions, stay focused, or feel motivated.
To bring your nervous system back into balance:
- Practice Grounding Exercises: Placing your hands in cool water or standing barefoot, focusing on the sensations in your body, or noticing five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste can help you reconnect to the present.
- Use Tapping (EFT): Gently tapping on acupressure points around the body while focusing on the stressor can calm the nervous system, alleviate stress, reduce anxiety, and restore calm.
- Engage in Breathwork: Simple breathing techniques, like Box Breathing (inhale for the count of 4, hold for the count of 4, exhale for the count of 4, hold for the count of 4), can quickly reduce tension, encourage a sense of calm, and increase your resilience by regulating your response to stress.
These tools help shift the body from a reactive state to a responsive state, empowering you to navigate daily stressors with more ease and grace. Taking small steps to support nervous system health can pave the way for better sleep, improved resilience, and a deeper sense of calm. Prioritizing these self-care techniques can help you regain balance and live in greater harmony with yourself and the world around you.
The Benefits of Warmth
As days get shorter and colder, heat often plays a larger part in our lives. From hot meals, crackling fires, and bundling up to go outside in the chilly weather, warmth in winter can be especially relaxing. Aside from the comfort of a heated blanket or a hot drink on a cold day, warmth has many benefits for our bodies and minds. Heat soothes soreness, relaxes joints and muscles, and encourages blood flow, which can increase healing. Heat therapy has been shown to boost the immune system and promote the release of endorphins. When utilized correctly and intentionally, heat can have a huge impact on our well-being.
Heat has a role in many IHWC services, such as fascial release, massage, and especially in our far infrared sauna.
Far infrared saunas work by utilizing specialized heaters that emit a spectrum of infrared light. Far infrared heat penetrates directly into body tissues, which delivers effective therapy at lower, more comfortable temperatures than you might find in a traditional hot air sauna.
Our far infrared sauna offers many health benefits, including:
- Detoxification - Using a far infrared sauna results in increased perspiration, which is a highly effective way to reduce toxins in our bodies.
- Relaxation and Stress Relief - Far infrared sauna therapy can improve mood, reduce stress, and relax muscles. It has also been shown to improve sleep.
- Cardiovascular Benefits - Using far infrared sauna therapy has been shown to have positive effects on circulation, blood pressure, and heart disease.
- Decreased Inflammation - Far infrared therapy has been shown to reduce inflammation and reduce chronic pain.
In addition to these benefits, far infrared saunas have been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, helping to relax us and bring our nervous system into balance.
To schedule an infrared sauna session:
call us at 541-239-5090​
IHWC also offers several products that utilize heat to promote wellness:
The Venom Back works by using heat, compression and vibration to reduce pain in your lower back.
Rock Sauce Fire is a topical muscle and joint relief that provides strong heating sensations that last for hours.
Sound Healing and our Nervous System
From our Sound Healer, Gaylene Bruce
Our nervous system is vital to our well-being. The nervous system is a network of nerves and cells that carry information throughout our body and ensure that each organ system can communicate with one another. It is fundamental to how we think, how we feel, and how we perform.
In our evolutionary history, the threatening situations humans experienced were often short-lived. If we were being chased by a predator, our fight or flight mechanism would kick in, and afterwards we returned to a state of peace so we could rest, digest, and recover.
Modern day humans often face the problem of constant stressors, which our nervous systems were not designed to handle. Things like deadlines, bills, traffic, work and more can push our nervous system into the state of fight or flight, and our bodies can get stuck in that state.
Years of exposure to stress can wear down our adrenals, which may cause a state of adrenal fatigue or burnout that affects the health of our whole body. Chronic stress and burnout has been linked to issues with our digestion, skin, blood pressure, sleep, and auto-immune system. Thankfully, it has been shown that if we are able to treat and reduce stress, it often reduces the likelihood that more serious issues will develop.
There are many approaches to treating chronic stress. One holistic health approach is to utilize retraining techniques that help teach our brains and bodies how to process stress. Sound therapy is one such technique. Sound therapy uses sound frequencies and vibrations to induce deep relaxation and promote physical, mental, and spiritual healing. Slow, relaxing sound vibrations can encourage our bodies to slow breathing, heart rate, and even brain waves to match the sound, which can help activate our parasympathetic nervous system and soothe our fight or flight response.
Through time and practice, we can help ourselves heal by processing and releasing stress after stressful events so it doesn’t get stored in our systems and build up to be toxic and debilitating. Sound therapy can be highly beneficial in this process, as it requires minimal effort and time, which can facilitate the success of retraining our brains. Sound therapy is a relaxing, easy, unobtrusive way to help us heal from adrenal fatigue and other stress related conditions by encouraging our bodies to slow down and recover.
With the hustle and bustle of the holiday season upon us, it is important to take time for self care. As I always say, you can’t pour from an empty cup or even a full one. You serve best from what is overflowing!
Wishing each of you a Happy Thanksgiving! May you be mindful of all the things you are grateful for.
Join us December 30th from 6:30 - 7:30 PM for our next sound healing session.
Updated Acupuncture Pricing for 2025
Our acupuncture prices are changing in the new year - take advantage of 2024 pricing for 2025!
Buy 3, 5, 10 visit packages (no limit) from now until the end of the year. Those packages will not expire until 12/31/25 (previously had a 6 month expiration).
- 3 visit package: $200
- 5 visit package: $325
- 10 visit package: $600 (savings of $150)*
*Special only for November/December 2024
From January 1, 2025:
Package pricing in 2025:
- 3 visit package: $215 (save $25)
- 5 visit package: $350 (save $50)
- 10 visit package: $680 (save $120)
Single follow up appointment cost: $80
Trunk or Treat
The first annual Trunk or Treat was a great success! It was wonderful to see all the families that attended, as well as the healthy treats provided at each trunk. We were so excited to participate, and we are already looking forward to next year!
Thank you again to Cheyenne Christensen and Trailhead/Anthony Lakes for organizing this event!
Until next time,
The IHWC Team
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