Accessing your nervous system
- shayne851
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
If you’re reading this: Congratulations! You have a nervous system!
Most of us don’t think about our nervous system until something feels off, tight muscles that won’t relax, lingering pain, poor recovery from workouts, or feeling constantly “on edge.” The truth is, your nervous system is behind all of it. The nervous system doesn't just control your body movement, it's responsible for telling you how you feel in it.
The nervous system is the part of us that allows us to experience and act upon the world around us. All of our thoughts, actions, and emotions can fit into three main functions: sensory input, integration, and motor output.
The central nervous system (CNS), consists of our the brain and spinal cord, it acts as our command center. Interneurons (association neurons) are the interface between sensory and motor neurons, and are the most abundant in the CNS.
The peripheral nervous system (PNS) is made up of the many nerves branching from our brain and spine. There are sensory neurons that transmit impulses from sensory receptors to the CNS, and motor neurons that send impulses from the CNS to muscles, organs, and glands in the rest of the body. Within the PNS:
The somatic nervous system controls voluntary muscle movement.
The autonomic nervous system: controls involuntary bodily functions, such as digestion, breathing, and heart rate. It is categorized into two complementary systems:
The sympathetic division, which mobilizes the body into action and amps up into a fight or flight state.
The parasympathetic division, which gets the body to calm down into a rest, digest, and repair mode.
Understanding this matters because every sensation you feel, tightness, pain, ease, coordination or lack of is processed through these systems. When something feels “off” in your body, it’s not just the muscle or joint it’s how your nervous system is interpreting and responding to what’s happening.
Massage and the Nervous System
When you walk out of a massage feeling looser, lighter, or more coordinated, that change didn’t just happen in your muscles, it happened in your nervous system too. Massage helps your body reinterpret tension, improve communication between tissues, and shift patterns that may have been stuck for years.
The more massages we receive, the better we become at feeling our bodies and moving our limbs without having to look at where they are in space. All massage therapists work with the nervous system to encourage change. When sensory receptors are stimulated by touch, sensory neurons transmit this information to the central nervous system, and motor neurons send signals from the CNS to the rest of the body. These signals tell our muscles to guard, contract, release, and maintain stasis. Therapists with good anatomical knowledge can improve peripheral nervous system function by working on tissues that compress or impinge on nerves.
D, one of our senior therapists, specializes in working through adhesion and scar tissue that forms along the nerve pathways. This has remarkable effects, not only by improving the fatigue of skeletal muscle, but also improving the function of systems controlled by the autonomic nervous system.
Neuro Kinetic therapy (NKT) and Proprioceptive Deep Tendon Reflex therapy (PDTR) practiced by Jason and Benjamin, engage with the nervous system by providing specific stimuli that will inhibit or activate muscle function. This will find any imbalance and change neurological patterns that affect movement. Even without modalities that specifically focus on the nervous system, massage can help the recipient feel more connected to their body, and more efficient at moving. Functional MRI studies have shown that during massage, there is an increase in brain activity in the inferior parietal cortex, a region of the brain that is involved in interpreting sensory information and building spatial representations that guide movement.
Kinesiotape and the Nervous System
Another way to interact with the nervous system that you may not have thought about is Kinesiotape. This is a flexible adhesive bandage that is used to manage pain, stimulate muscle engagement, and increase lymphatic flow. You may have seen your favorite athletes with kinesiotape around their joints.
Kinesiotape creates space between the superficial and deep fascial layers beneath the skin. This also allows the lymphatic system vessels located between these two subcutaneous fascial layers to work more efficiently with properly applied kinesiotape. When your lymph system works, you heal better.
While we don’t have empirically proven explanations for why kinesiotape can be as effective at pain management and muscle stimulation as practitioners and clients find it to be. One of the leading theories among practitioners is that nerve receptors in the skin, when stimulated by movement and stretch caused by kinesiotape, can affect muscle tissue connected by the same nerve. Clients are often surprised at how a small amount of stimulation at the superficial level can help weak and taxed muscles feel activated and online, or provide neurological distraction from pain.
This matters because sometimes the body doesn’t need more force, it needs a softer form of communication. Kinesiotape offers a low-intensity, constant input to your nervous system, which can help reduce pain, improve movement, and support recovery without adding more strain.
Affecting the Somatic Nervous System
The somatic nervous system, which is a part of the peripheral nervous system, enables voluntary movement by controlling skeletal muscles. The SNS is also involved in automatic and involuntary responses, such as pulling your hand away after touching something hot.
We can directly improve upon our SNS ability to move and respond through practice and visualization. When we decide to move, the CNS sends electrical and chemical signals along neurons to our muscles. Each time a neuron is used to transmit signals, the myelin sheath that insulates the neuron thickens. A thicker myelin sheath means there is an increase in the speed and efficiency of that signal, meaning the second time we try a movement will be more effective than the first. Movement is not the only way to achieve this. Visualizing muscle activity can have a similar effect on myelin sheath development as practicing the movement itself.
Meaning we don’t even need to move to increase the efficiency of our nervous system.
This is why repetition matters in everything from working out to recovering from injury. The more often you perform a movement correctly, the more efficient and automatic it becomes. It’s also why mental rehearsal is used by athletes: your nervous system doesn’t fully distinguish between real and vividly imagined movement.
Affecting the Autonomic Nervous System
If you’ve ever felt your heart race under stress or noticed your body relax after a deep breath, you’ve already experienced your autonomic nervous system at work. The powerful part is that even though most of it runs automatically, you can influence it, especially through your breath.
Most of our bodily functions like breathing, digesting and our blood circulating are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. While these functions are outside our ability to control directly, we can still influence these functions. The respiratory system is primarily controlled by the autonomic nervous system, but we can choose to pay attention and control our breathing with our somatic nervous system. Think about the last time you were in a yoga class or physically exerted yourself, and you intentionally changed your breathing. Did you notice any other changes? Like a decrease in your heart rate or a calming effect? Controlled breathing can have some of the most significant effects on our ANS. We can slow and speed up our heart rate, and we can switch between sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system states.
To put yourself in a sympathetic nervous system state, you want your inhalations to last longer than your exhalations. Bodybuilders are taught to do this by exhaling on the quick concentric muscle contraction, like when they push the bar away from their chest in a bench press. Then they inhale slowly as they let the bar down.
To put yourself in a parasympathetic nervous system state, make your exhales last longer than your inhales. A common breathing exercise to help people wind down and de-escalate from a flight or flight state is the 4-7-8 breathing pattern. Take 4 seconds to inhale, hold the breath for 7 seconds, and release the exhale for 8 seconds. Repeat this cycle, and notice if your heart rate slows, if your jaw and shoulder muscle are able to relax a little more, and if you feel an increased sense of peace and relaxation.
Conclusion
Your nervous system is constantly adapting how you move, how you breathe, and how you experience the world around you. The tightness you feel, the ease you’re chasing, the stress you carry they’re not just physical states, they’re patterns your body has learned and the exciting thing is they can be unlearned when those patterns no longer serve you.
But how do we unlearn these patterns?
Through touch, movement, and the simple act of mindful breath, you can begin to shift how your body responds. This means you can shift from tension to ease, from stress to recovery, from disconnection to awareness.
Whether it’s through massage, intentional movement, or small daily practices, the goal isn’t to “fix” the body it’s to teach your nervous system a better way to function. And once it learns, everything feels different and we are here to help teach you.
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