The sympathetic nervous system, which helps your heart and other vital organs function all the time, increases activity in response to danger or stress, preparing the body for extra demands ...

What Does the Sympathetic Nervous System Do? Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your “fight or flight” response. It’s activated when your brain senses that you’re in a ...

On the flipside of fight-or-flight is rest-and-digest. It’s the body’s way of rebalancing itself after the danger has passed.

The term “sympathetic nervous system overload” sounds daunting, but the root cause is pedestrian: stress. Stress is, of course, something we all experience all the time, but left unchecked, it ...

Typically, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. It helps shut down your body's stress response, leading to lower cortisol levels, and bringing you back down to your baseline. But if you've ...

If the PSNS didn't exist, the sympathetic nervous system would take over during times of stress — and your body would not have a way of turning off its dramatic response. The PSNS controls your ...

The urgent need to achieve clarity about the stress response system is rooted in the mysterious rise over the past forty years—the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms—of common stress ...

Your autonomic nervous system helps regulate emotional balance, but chronic stress or trauma can trigger an overactive fight-or-flight response. Nervous system dysregulation refers to a condition ...