The Automatic Nervous System is divided into two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic part allows you to use up the energy you have saved within, whereas the parasympathetic is just relaxed and stores your energy to regulate it. I am going to be talking about the sympathetic nervous system and am about to share with you a story of a good example of this “flight or fight” situation. I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard something downstairs. At first I thought it was my dog so I let it go. I heard the noise again and decided to go downstairs to take a look. I started to get scared because most of the lights were off and I couldn’t see much, but I kept on hearing footsteps. I do not know why I didn’t think it would be anyone in my family. I guess I was too tired to even think at that point, but I kept walking down the stairs and I finally got to the bottom. I heard another noise and at this point I was very scared. My heart was racing, my palms were sweating, and I could feel the nervousness all the way up to my head, and I wasn’t thinking straight. Then I don’t know what happened to me but I sprinted into the kitchen, screaming, to find the “stranger” in my house. When I got in there me and my sister were standing face to face both screaming and began yelling at each other. We scared each other for no reason. In that moment, I do not know what happened to me and how my adrenaline popped into my body so quick, but after hearing about the sympathetic nervous system, I knew exactly that that’s what kicked in. The sympathetic nervous system arouses the body and that is when your flight or fight response comes into play. When you’re in a scary or rough situation and you don’t know what is going to happen next and your heart starts to race and you start to sweat, that’s how you know you are going through the sympathetic nervous system. And if it wasn’t for that, I would have never caught my sister!
2 thoughts on “The Sympathetic Nervous System”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I laughed at this story because I think this a common experience a lot of us have gone through before. When we start to hear or see things that may be a potential danger to us, our body naturally responds by starting up the sympathetic system, which as you stated, does things such as increase heart rate, speed up breathing, and release the hormone adrenaline into the bloodstream to name a few. I have had similar experiences of hearing noises late at night in my house and assuming the worst of what that noise could be. When I realized the noise could be a danger to me, that’s when I felt my heartbeat quicken, which was my body’s way of getting ready for the fight-or-flight response that could have taken place when I went downstairs to see what the noise really was. This is an example of the body’s way of preparing us for a possible threat, although most of the time this system seems to be triggered just for cautionary purposes.
I loved your story about the sympathetic nervous system and how this effects our body and how it effected you during a time of fear. The sympathetic nervous system, as we know, triggers our body to react to some sort of emotion that gives us that “fight or flight” feeling. Usually this feeling results in sweating, dilated pupils, increased heart rate, muscle tightening and increased blood flow. Your story about that time you felt all those symptoms due to you thinking someone was in your basement even though it really was not anything to worry about it related to mine because the feeling of someone banging on my door trying to come in and “kill me” gave me the same feelings that you felt. It is so crazy to me that our bodies control us like this and are capable of giving us these insane feelings during a time of fear, stress, excitement or anxiety.