Your nervous system is a beautifully complex thing—broken down into two main branches, then more branches within those branches, and so on. But when we talk about nervous system healing, we are focusing in on a “sub-branch” called the autonomic nervous system (ANS).

Its job? To constantly scan your environment for cues of safety or danger (remember that smoke detector I talked about last week)? And depending on what it detects, it activates one of two modes. Cue…your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.