What Is The Parasympathetic Nervous System? (Rest and Digest)

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

you subscribe so we can keep this content coming your way and thanks so

much for watching