Restoring Balance: Yogic Tools to Calm an Overactive Nervous System

This course qualifies for 5 CEs with Yoga Alliance

Every second of the day, your body is functioning seemingly effortlessly, regulating the literally millions of physiological functions that keep your body running.

The part of the nervous system in charge of orchestrating all these functions behind the scenes, so to speak, is the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system regulates all the functions that are largely beyond our conscious control, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and on and on. It is the essential player in maintaining homeostasis, i.e., the balance of all bodily functions in relation to each other.

So not surprisingly, when the autonomic nervous system goes awry, it is not pretty.

And unfortunately, for the 70 million people worldwide suffering from a condition known as dysautonomia, this can be a daily nightmare with little hope of a cure, let alone a diagnosis.

Dysautonomia has been described as the health epidemic you’ve never heard of. It has recently come to the fore with the advent of Long COVID. The symptoms of Long COVID are increasingly coming to be understood - at least in part - as being a form of dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system — or dysautonomia. However, some physicians believe that the breakdown in the balance of the autonomic nervous system is involved in a long range of diseases, including IBS, migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain syndrome, as well as possibly some autoimmune and epidemic diseases like Lyme disease, alongside emotional or mental issues such as severe insomnia, trauma, anxiety, and depression.

The symptoms of dysautonomia are many. A partial list includes fatigue, cognitive impairment, weakness, headache, dizziness, shortness of breath, sleep problems, difficulty standing, nausea, diarrhea, joint and muscle pain, anxiety or depression, a feeling of pins and needles, and more.

Unfortunately, because the symptoms are so diverse, people suffering from dysautonomia can go for years before receiving a proper diagnosis by a doctor who recognizes the condition.

In this online course, acclaimed yoga teacher Doug Keller will explain in simple terms what this dysfunction is and how yoga may offer a window into how some degree of balance might be restored to nervous system function.

The special focus is on the relationship of dysautonomia to the vagus nerve, one of the primary ‘players’ in the autonomic nervous system.

Doug will show the potential tools yoga offers to calm and balance the nervous system, in addition to the kinds of treatments the medical community provides.

What You Will Learn

• Why ‘exercise’ in the usual sense is simply not possible for sufferers of Long Covid or other forms of dysautonomia and why it can make the symptoms worse. 
• Why a different approach to recovery through movement and breathing is needed, and how yoga can address that need.
• Why people suffering from this condition face unique difficulties in taking up a yoga practice and how to approach yoga the right way.  
• The vagus nerve's role in regulating the nervous system and yogic insights into best practices for enhancing the balance of the vagus nerve.
• Treatments offered by the medical community that hold promise for providing relief from dysautonomia.