by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life through the power of TRUST.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this episode, we delve into the concept of sympathetic dominance and its impact on our nervous system and overall well-being. We explore how an imbalanced nervous system can prevent us from achieving wholeness and trust in life.
Understanding Sympathetic Dominance: We begin with an overview of the nervous system, focusing on the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. We discuss how sympathetic dominance—where the fight or flight response is overly active—can lead to chronic stress, anxiety, and various physical symptoms.
Three Main Sources of Tension: This episode breaks down three primary sources of tension that contribute to sympathetic dominance:
1. Physical Tension: Often caused by sedentary lifestyles and poor posture, physical tension can be alleviated through practices like foam rolling, yin yoga, and breathwork. Techniques such as 4-7-8 breathing and box breathing are highlighted as effective methods for releasing physical tension and regulating the nervous system.
2. Mental Tension: Rooted in our belief systems and the choices we make, mental tension arises from living out of alignment with the truth. By constantly questioning our assumptions and aligning our beliefs with reality, we can reduce mental stress and live more authentically.
3. Emotional Tension: Unresolved emotions like shame, guilt, and trauma contribute to emotional tension. Facing these emotions head-on and integrating the shadow self can help release this tension, leading to a more balanced and whole existence.
Creative Status: Sympathetic Dominance
Join me in this episode as we explore the sources of tension that lead to sympathetic dominance and how to address them. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to regulate their nervous system and move towards a more relaxed, authentic, and real life.
Stay real out there,
Oli
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Creative Status Links:
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Yoga flows (including YIN DISSOLUTION): http://www.youtube.com/@vin2yin
BAM Challenge: https://www.olianderson.co.uk/BAM
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My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
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Unlocking Sympathetic Dominance: The Path from Tension to Trust (Transcript)
#100: Oli Anderson: Unlocking Realness: The Path from Tension to Trust
This is a podcast about being a real human being
Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about being a real human being—about breaking down some of the building blocks of the human condition that are universal, common to us all. These are the things that can allow us to unblock ourselves at the level of our relationship with identity, the ego, so that we can ultimately move on the path towards wholeness: a deeper connection to ourselves, a deeper connection to other people, and a deeper connection to life.
Traditionally, this has been an interview podcast, and there are some more interviews in the pipeline. However, for the last five or six episodes—something like that—it’s been solo episodes, which is just me talking about various things. That’s because I totally burned out from doing interviews for a while. I was just doing them all the time, and I needed a break.
This podcast is about releasing unnecessary tension in our lives
That’s kind of related to the theme of this podcast episode because I want to talk about sympathetic dominance—getting into a state of being where our nervous system is out of regulation. Our parasympathetic nervous system isn’t doing what it needs to do because we’ve stressed ourselves out so much. We’ll be looking at how we can release some of the unnecessary tension we carry within ourselves so that we can regulate our nervous system and get back on the path to wholeness, realness, and truth.
Ultimately, a lot of what we talk about on this podcast—if you’re new here, welcome—is about the journey from fragmentation to wholeness. If your nervous system is out of regulation, you’re never going to be able to connect to wholeness as deeply as possible. Connecting to wholeness boils down to trust, and you can only trust if you’re relaxed. That means getting your nervous system into a regulated state so you’re breathing properly, not panicking, not seeing threats where there aren’t any, and allowing yourself to trust and flow with life.
It’s really important to understand the main sources of tension in our lives—this is what we’ll be talking about in this episode: what we can do about them and how we can move forward with more flow instead of force, more release instead of tension. But we also need to maintain a healthy level of stress and tension so we can keep growing through our edge, becoming the most real, true, and authentic version of ourselves.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I almost said I wouldn’t make this a long episode, but I swore a solemn oath to myself in the last one that I’d never say that again—because sometimes I say it won’t be long, and then it ends up being a long one!
There are three main sources of tension in our lives that we can tackle
So, let’s get right into this. Ultimately, I’m going to give you three takeaways: there are three main sources of tension in our lives that we can do something about because they bring unnecessary friction into our experience. I’ll give you those in a minute, but first, let’s start with a quick discussion about the nervous system. We won’t get into too much detail about what sympathetic dominance is, how it shows up in people’s lives, and why it’s important to know this so you can start dealing with it.
If you haven’t heard, we all have a nervous system. It’s composed of various different streams, let’s say, that send signals to the brain, which affects how we perceive and interpret the world—and that impacts everything we do. There’s the central nervous system, which runs down the spine and sends signals to the brain. That’s the abridged version of that.
But then we also have the autonomic nervous system, which is an involuntary system that does all the work beneath the surface before we even start thinking about things. The autonomic nervous system is broken down into two streams, as I’m calling them. For some bizarre reason, we have the sympathetic nervous system, often called the fight-or-flight system, which prepares us for action by increasing heart rate, dilating the pupils, slowing digestion, and releasing hormones like adrenaline. Then we have the parasympathetic nervous system, known as the rest-and-digest system, which does the opposite. It’s the yin to the yang, if you want to use that language, of the sympathetic nervous system.
The parasympathetic system promotes relaxation, as “rest and digest” suggests. It reduces heart rate, aids digestion, facilitates recovery and healing, and helps us to breathe properly, among other things. Both parts of the nervous system are, of course, really important—but they also need to be balanced for us to have the optimal experience as human beings here on planet Earth.
Because there are so many external sources of stress in the modern world—and many more internal sources of stress, which we’ll get into because of our internal relationship with ourselves—so many people are running around on the verge of sympathetic dominance. That means the sympathetic nervous system is overly active compared to the parasympathetic stream. This causes all kinds of problems and unnecessary symptoms, like elevated heart rate and blood pressure, tense muscles, difficulty relaxing or sleeping, poor digestion, bloating, constipation, anxiety, irritability, and fatigue, despite being in a hyper-alert state.
All these symptoms are things that people often identify as just part of their personality or default experience, but really, it’s because their nervous system has gone haywire. If they could remove some of the unnecessary sources of stress and tension in their lives, they could balance themselves out. And when they do balance themselves out, it affects their personality because they stop filtering everything through the heightened state of stress that’s been distorting their view of the world.
As they relax, they’ll be able to trust life more, face themselves more, and just generally have a better experience. To be quite honest, and to keep this simple, the quality of our life is ultimately about how much we can slow down and relax. If we’re getting worked up and stuck on the hamster wheel of busy thoughts going round and round because the sympathetic nervous system is constantly seeing threats and pumping adrenaline into our system, we don’t have the best experience we can. More importantly, we don’t get the results we want from life because we’re never actually in life.
Something you might have heard me say before—if you’ve listened to previous podcasts or seen my other stuff—is that if you put something real in, you get something real out. If you put something unreal in, you get something unreal out. Jesus said it in a slightly different way: “A corrupt tree brings forth bad fruit,” or something like that. Ultimately, it’s just a way of saying that the things we put into our life—the input—affect the process we go through, which in turn affects the output.
If we’re in a state of sympathetic dominance, where we’re not really present in our lives but still trying to do things, we’re actually putting something unreal into our lives. So the results we get are unreal as well. It becomes a case of “unreal in, unreal out.”
If you want to live a real life—meaning you’re moving towards wholeness, constantly growing and evolving, living your values and true intentions, and experiencing all the amazing things the human experience can offer—then a very important foundation is to examine your relationship with your own nervous system. Understand how it’s affecting your view of yourself, other people, and life itself, so that you can regulate it if necessary. Remove the unnecessary tension and friction that cause you to see life unclearly, and then you’ll be able to move forward with trust, flow, and acceptance.
All the amazing virtues and qualities spoken about by the great spiritual traditions can only be accessed when your parasympathetic nervous system is regulated. If your parasympathetic system isn’t in balance, you can’t trust life. You can’t trust anything, because you’ll constantly be perceiving threats. Some of those threats may have been real once upon a time, but probably— and we’ll get into this in a second—you’re perceiving extra levels of threat because of your inner relationship with yourself and the way you’re interpreting things. This then spirals negatively because the adrenaline, cortisol, and other hormones being pumped into you—if you have sympathetic dominance—are just making things worse.
That’s why it’s important to work on this.
There are three different sources of tension that we carry for completely unnecessary reasons
Now, I’m going to give you three different sources of tension in our lives that you can start to deal with one by one. These will help you regulate your nervous system and be good for you in general, as they’ll carry you forward in a real, healthy, and true way. In every episode, I like to give three takeaways, and there are three kinds of tension we often carry for completely unnecessary reasons. When we do this, it adds unnecessary friction to our experience of life, and that friction constantly gives us feedback that something is wrong. If we can remove the tension, we can remove a lot of the unnecessary nonsense from our experience.
That’s why it’s so important to work on these areas. We’ll go through them one by one, but just so you know, the three areas are very simple: physical tension, mental tension, and emotional tension.
Physical tension is the muscular tension you carry in your body, as well as how you breathe. Then there’s mental tension, which is about your belief system and how it keeps you from the truth, makes you fragmented, or causes you to cling to an identity that isn’t real—this creates unnecessary friction. Finally, emotional tension consists of shame, guilt, trauma, and unresolved emotional stuff that we fear facing. This is because it may force us to let go of certain things we’ve attached to at the level of the ego, and it also brings up shadow aspects of ourselves—parts we’ve disowned or aren’t ready to face about who we really are.
When we carry tension at any of these levels—physical, mental, or emotional—we’re exacerbating the problem of sympathetic dominance. We’re keeping the nervous system in a heightened state of alertness, which makes us more stressed than necessary. The way to rid ourselves of this tension is to chip away at it, piece by piece, letting go of what we’re holding on to physically, mentally, and emotionally, so we can free ourselves and start flowing again.
All three levels are interconnected—the mind-body system is one system. These aren’t separate entities or parts of who we are, but we’ll look at them one by one to break it down. Just remember, it’s all interconnected.
Now, regarding physical tension—it’s pretty self-explanatory. So many of us live sedentary lifestyles. We’re in offices all day, hunched over computers, bending our necks to stare at our phones, endlessly scrolling through whatever we’re doing on there. Even if we do exercise, it might be just one kind of exercise. Maybe we go to the gym and lift weights, or we do cardio. Generally, we’re doing a lot of yang activities—where we’re very active and doing things—without balancing it with yin, which is about loosening up and doing nothing.
The nervous system reflects this dichotomy too. Yang corresponds to the sympathetic nervous system, and yin to the parasympathetic. This also explains why so many people suffer from sympathetic dominance, as our culture is very yang.
When you carry tension in your muscles, you might not even realise it’s there, because you’ve become so accustomed to it that it feels normal. But if you are in this state, carrying tension in your muscular system will affect your experience as you move through the world. It will make you more uptight than you would be if you were releasing that tension.
A few weeks ago, I was doing a yoga session with someone, and we got the foam roller out. This person was super flexible, or at least I thought so. They were very flexible, but once we started using the foam roller, they were rolling around in what looked like agony—maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but still. They were really feeling the tension hidden in their muscles, tension they hadn’t even realised was there. By the end of the session, after releasing that tension with the foam roller and some yin yoga, it was like she had completely dissolved. It was as if I was looking at a totally different version of her.
The lesson I took from that experience is that many of us are walking around with tension that’s been in our bodies for years, but we don’t even know it. This tension affects the way we relate to ourselves and the world, often at an unconscious level, though sometimes consciously—like when we notice we can’t bend over and touch our toes as easily as we used to, or when we just feel uptight for no obvious reason.
The point is, when we carry that kind of tension in our bodies, it affects how we go through life and how we do things. One way to start relaxing and tapping into the parasympathetic nervous system is to make a conscious decision to release some of that tension on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Maybe you start with some morning stretches, or you get the foam roller out. I have something called a rumble roller. I have no affiliation with the company that makes it, but it’s been in my life for years, and I love it. It’s a foam roller, but with nobbly bits on it, and it’s honestly one of the best things in my life. I love hopping on it and giving myself a shoulder massage or working on my calves—whatever part of me needs it.
We accumulate so much tension over time, and if you have a system for dealing with it, whether it’s daily or weekly, you can start releasing that tension, whether you’re aware of it or not. The lesson here is that as we go through life, we all accumulate tension, so we need to find ways to balance it out.
One of the best practical tools for releasing physical tension is a foam roller. Yin yoga is also incredible. In fact, I recently created a yin yoga flow, which I uploaded to YouTube. It’s a 75-minute deep, dissolving yin practice. If you follow that, I guarantee it will release some tension from your muscular system.
Another source of physical tension is our breathing. One thing you can do to release tension is to slow down your breathing and practice pranayama or breathing exercises. I always recommend 4-7-8 breathing. You inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, and exhale for 8 seconds. You can do cycles of that. Another technique is box breathing—inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4 again. It’s called box breathing because the pattern is the same all the way around, like a box.
Both of these breathing exercises help release physical tension because when you’re stressed out, your sympathetic nervous system floods your body with adrenaline, and your breathing becomes shallow and quick. Your breath, whether you realise it or not, affects your personality, just like physical tension in your body does. If you can learn to regulate your breathing and slow it down, you’ll release this tension.
So, that’s the first takeaway: we carry tension in our bodies, in both our muscles and our breath, but it doesn’t need to be there. There are things we can do about it, and when we start releasing that tension, it will affect the other levels—mental and emotional—too. So, let’s move on to those quickly.
Most mental tension comes down to the choices that we make
So, to keep it brief, most mental tension comes down to the choices we make. Specifically, the choice between being real or unreal. No surprise—I love talking about what’s real and what’s not. Being real means aligning ourselves with the truth, moving toward wholeness, and taking responsibility for our lives. Being unreal means having a belief system that doesn’t serve us. This could be because it’s limiting, or simply because we choose to believe something for emotional reasons. For example, someone might believe Prince Charming (or Princess Charming) will show up at their door one day because they have an underlying need for love, even though deep down, they know it’s not realistic.
When our beliefs and the choices we make about those beliefs take us away from reality, it creates friction, which causes stress. The reason is simple: the only way to achieve results in life is by aligning our beliefs with the truth. If our beliefs don’t match reality, things don’t work out, and this disconnect causes stress. So, mental tension often comes from holding onto beliefs that life keeps showing us are off the mark, which leads to anxiety.
In many cases, this mental tension stems from the image we carry of ourselves. That image is often a reaction to unresolved emotional stuff, which we’ll get to soon. But for now, the key takeaway is this: if you want to regulate your nervous system, you need to live in a way that seeks out the truth and aligns with it. This doesn’t mean you’ll always have the truth. We all have limited perceptions and interpretations. But if you continually examine your beliefs, question your assumptions, and ask yourself whether the limits you’re putting on yourself—or the image you hold of yourself—are really true, you’ll eventually dissolve what’s not true. You’ll align yourself more with the flow of life, and that’s when things will start to feel easier and less stressful.
The other part of this is accepting life on its own terms. A lot of the stress we feel comes from resisting universal truths that apply to all of us. Take, for example, the law of cause and effect. If we want something from life, getting it is the effect, but we need to be the cause to make it happen. If you’re starting a business, for instance, getting the business off the ground is the effect, but you have to work the process—the cause—to get to that point. It’s the same with any goal.
Another truth that people resist is the importance of prioritisation and organisation. Let’s use the example of washing dishes. There’s so many memes about how washing dishes feels like pushing a boulder uphill, because it never ends. People get stressed by little things like that, so they put it off. But when they do, the problem just builds up—now they don’t just have a few dishes to wash, they have a whole mountain. And this pattern happens in many areas of life. When you keep avoiding small tasks, they turn into much bigger problems, causing even more stress. If you face life head-on, dealing with things as they happen, they don’t get out of control and overwhelm you.
Ultimately, the point here is that we add unnecessary tension to our lives by avoiding the truth. If we shift our mindset to face the truth, constantly questioning our beliefs about ourselves and the world, and align our actions with what we discover, we’ll eliminate much of the friction that causes stress. We’ll be able to live more freely, without the weight of unreal beliefs holding us back from where we want to go.
All sources of tension are interconnected
The final takeaway is emotional stress, which ties into both mental and physical stress. As I mentioned earlier, everything is interconnected. If we have unresolved emotional stress, it gets stored in the body and causes tension. A great example is something yoga teachers often talk about: emotions, or trauma, being stored in certain parts of the body. Brian Kest, who was on the podcast ages ago, mentioned that a lot of trauma is stored in the hips. Whether that’s true or not, it makes sense because I’ve seen people cry in yoga sessions when they release tension from deep poses like frog pose.
When we carry emotional trauma, shame, or guilt, it affects our mentality because we tend to avoid those emotions. In response, we create a version of ourselves, an identity, that hides those emotions, which I often refer to as the ego. The unprocessed emotional baggage forms part of the “shadow self.” To truly heal and grow, we must face and integrate the shadow self, which is why the tagline for this podcast is “Deconstruct the ego, integrate the shadow, and trust life.” It’s about facing those emotions so we can continue on the path to wholeness.
When we resist our emotions for too long, often out of self-judgment, we create more tension. People judge themselves as weak or “not good enough” if they feel anything other than positive emotions. So, they hide from their true feelings. But avoiding emotions only worsens the tension and keeps us in sympathetic dominance—the state where we can’t fully relax, always feeling like something’s missing. There’s a constant itch we can’t scratch, and we wander through life wondering if we’ll ever feel whole again. The truth is, we won’t feel whole until we face those emotions head-on.
John Bradshaw, in his book Healing the Shame that Binds You, says, “Emotions are energy in motion.” If we allow emotions to move, they will eventually dissolve. But when we hold onto them, due to a mental disconnect with ourselves or because of the emotional tension we carry, it creates friction. This tension, between our real emotions and the identity we’ve built to avoid them, also manifests physically in the body. If we don’t face this, we stay trapped in that state of tension, and it impacts every part of our lives.
The good news is that when we release bodily tension, improve our mental relationship with ourselves, and summon the courage to face our emotional baggage, healing begins to happen naturally. A lot of unnecessary tension dissolves, and we can balance our nervous system, bringing us closer to where we want to be.
So, to wrap up, we’ve talked about physical, mental, and emotional tension. Much of this tension is something we can choose to let go of by living in a way that’s more aligned with how our parasympathetic nervous system wants us to be—relaxed, breathing slowly, stretching mentally, emotionally, and physically. The lesson here is that what’s good for the body is good for the mind. If we can stretch ourselves in healthy ways—both physically and mentally—we can release tension and get back on the path to wholeness. We don’t have to live in constant stress or sympathetic dominance. We can find balance, and when we’re balanced, we can trust life because we can trust ourselves.
As I mentioned, the parasympathetic nervous system is a prerequisite for trust. When we reach that state of balance, that’s when life becomes real, and we can finally be who we’re meant to be—without the filter of the sympathetic nervous system’s stress responses, but from a place rooted in truth and balance.
So, that was my take on sympathetic dominance and the different levels of tension. Apologies if I rambled a bit—it’s a lot of information! But to sum it up: there are three levels of tension—the physical, the mental, and the emotional—and there are things you can do about each one. The key is to start small. If you feel stressed, pick one thing at each level and work on it.
For the physical: loosen up with some stretching, foam rolling, or yoga, and focus on your breath.
For the mental: examine your beliefs. What beliefs are holding you back? Are you resisting the truth about yourself or life? Journaling is a great way to explore this.
For the emotional: what emotions have you been avoiding? Again, journaling or meditation can help. Yin yoga is also great for processing emotions since it brings up a lot when you’re still and present with yourself.
Ultimately, choose to do something about your tension—whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional—and start from there.
Practical Tip:
For each of the three areas—physical, mental, and emotional—identify one specific action you can take and commit to it. For those interested in a more structured approach, I’ve created the BAM Challenge on my website. BAM stands for “Bare Ass Minimum,” and it’s a seven-day challenge where I’ll send you one simple task each day to help you start improving your life. The idea is to keep things straightforward and manageable, so you can make real progress without feeling overwhelmed.
In contrast to my more in-depth course, the Personality Transplant, which is comprehensive but time-consuming, the BAM Challenge is designed to be quick and practical. It covers essentials like meditation, exercise, vision setting, and habit formation. If you’re interested, you can check it out at olianderson.co.uk/bam. The link will also be in the show notes.
If you want to dive deeper or discuss how to implement these changes, feel free to book a call with me through my website at olianderson.co.uk/talk. I help people transform their lives by clarifying their vision, setting goals, and integrating these principles into their daily routines.
Ultimately, regulating your nervous system and letting go of tension provides a solid foundation for a healthier relationship with yourself, with life, and with the truth. It sets the stage for building something that not only serves you but also positively impacts everyone around you.
So, go ahead and start sorting out that nervous system. I hope you find this helpful. Thanks for tuning in, and peace to you.