Our thoughts are often thought to come without strings attached, like the float around in our mind space without doing much of anything. But as we learned in this mindset series, our thoughts are much more than just things floating in space but signals that change the entire scope of your body, for good or for bad.
Today, we’re going to answer the question – can your mindset boost your metabolism?
To understand this, you have to have an understanding of how the autonomic nervous system works. That’s what we dive into on today’s podcast.
I’ll answer the question of how can your mindset boost your metabolism by breaking down the parasympathetic and sympathetic phases of our body and how our mindset controls these phases.
Then we’ll dive into how you can fix this problem – to create healthy mind space to boost your metabolism for good. Because more than just what you eat and how much you exercise is the system that controls it all – that is exactly what we talk about on this podcast.
Don’t forget to grab the free download that goes along with today’s podcast. One simple exercise that can help your body shift to fat burning mode. It may surprise you —>
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the autonomic nervous system
You may cringe the second I talk about the nervous system – the long intertwined nerves that run throughout the body. What else do you need to know? A LOT! Well, not a ton but enough to show you that metabolism is a series of intricate processes your body has ultimately working for your survival.
One process is called the autonomic nervous system.
The most basic explanation I can give you of the autonomic nervous system is this:
The autonomic nervous system is the part of the nervous system responsible for control of the bodily functions not consciously directed, such as breathing, the heartbeat, and digestive processes. It is broken up into three phases:
- parasympathetic – rest and digest phase
- sympathetic – fight or flight response
- enteric – responsible for digestive processes
We’re going to talk about the parasympathetic and sympathetic today because the enteric is mostly its own system.
nervous system and metabolism
So what’s this have to do with your metabolism? As you’ll learn in the podcast the two phases of the autonomic nervous system control how your body responds via chemical messengers, hormones, enzymes, energy, and cell activity.
Your autonomic nervous system is controlled based on the perceived environment. This perception it is getting is coming from your mind.
See the flow?
Your environment -> your mindset -> your emotions -> autonomic nervous system firing -> splits either into the parasympathetic or sympathetic phases.
why does it matter?
What phase you’re in determines how your body responses. The sympathetic phase is our fight or flight response. The sympathetic is the stress response of the body that signals survival. Which also means it goes into a conservation mode. Hoarding energy, fat and making you crave all of the things. Not to mention – it releases cortisol which also sends our inflammatory response into overdrive.
In the short term, it’s great to keep you alive, give you quick energy in case a bear might be chasing you or to send inflammation in time of injury. In the long term – it leaves you sick, tired and overweight. All thanks to excess stress.
On the other hand, the parasympathetic phase is the rest and digest phase of the body. It is a “safe” space for your body and allows for healing, rejuvenation, detoxification, digestion, regulation and deep rest.
You can see the contrast.
The problem – most of us are living in the sympathetic mode for most of our life, even losing our ability to get deep sleep leading to continuous sympathetic mode. Which also means, no matter how well you eat or how much you exercise you won’t be able to lose any weight because it’s impossible in the stressed state of the body.
how to fix it
To reset our metabolism – or get it revving again – we need to drive our body back into the parasympathetic state. There are many ways to do this – which I break down in detail on the podcast- but one of the best ways is the act of deep breathing.
I’ve created a handout that explains how to do this and why you should be practicing deep breathes throughout the day. Get the download by clicking below.
It’s as simple as slowing the body down, percieving positivity in your environment, healing your mindset, doing deep emotional work, focusing on working with your body instead of against it and enjoying the process of getting healthy.
Of course, that made it seem easy, but shouldn’t health be easy? Why do we make it so difficult? Ponder that question and then grab the handout.
metabolism series
If you liked what you learned in this podcast, make sure you check out all the other podcasts in this series.
- How You Actually Burn Calories
- Leptin: The One Hormone You Need to Know To Change Your Metabolism
- One Thing You Need to Know About Weight Loss
- The Black Hole of Fitness Doom
- 5 Tips to Crave Health Food
Don’t forget each week I create a free download to help you in this process. Make sure you grab your free download below.
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