The Importance of Listening to Your Nervous System: A Christian Counselor Explains

Let’s do a quick mental exercise. Briefly recall the last time that you were in a mildly stressful situation. Maybe you were rushing out the door to your car because you were late for an appointment. Or perhaps you were anticipating having an important conversation with your boss, a friend, or a family member.

Now, once you’ve got that mildly stressful situation in your mind, bring your attention to what’s happening in your body at that moment. What is your breathing pattern? What actions does your body want to take? What sensations do you experience in your body, and where do you feel them? Finally, what emotions come to the surface? All of these are signals that come from a deeper place in you: your nervous system.

The Nervous System

The human nervous system is a complex and intricate web of nerve cells that send and receive electrical and chemical signals all over our bodies. From our brain stems, through our torso, into our arms, down into our stomachs, and into our legs, it covers a lot of ground, and it is an essential part of us that God has made.

The questions above aim to bring awareness to what our nervous system is telling us about what we are experiencing, even when we may be unaware of it. They slow us down by training our awareness and attention to rest on a specific part of our experience: breathing, action, sensation, and emotion.

Living in the modern world causes a significant amount of stress or anxiety for many people. Between juggling work responsibilities, maintaining friendships, raising children, and making sure basic needs are met, our lives can become overwhelming and fast-paced. While God has graciously given us the ability to adapt to our circumstances and environments, many still find themselves feeling anxious, stressed, depressed, or stuck.

What Your Nervous System Tells You

But what if there was a way to understand these symptoms that we experience? What if there were a way to become more aware of the language our nervous system is speaking?

In their book, The Secret Language of the Body, authors Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin beautifully unpack the science behind the art of attuning to your nervous system. Through their experiences as therapists working with clients and presenting the science of the nervous system, they propose the need to make a shift from our heads to our bodies as the focal point for interpreting the world.

In short, “learning the secret language of the body begins with learning to listen, without judgment, to the unhelpful and habitual thoughts and narratives that are going on in your mind and peer beneath them to the experience of your body.”

Listening to Your Nervous System

The first step in learning to speak the language of the body is learning to listen. “Listening is much more than just hearing the messages from your nervous system; the skill of listening for awareness is a deeply regulating practice in and of itself…You already know this from your everyday life. We all long for connection and to be understood. In fact, it’s hardwired into our nervous systems as mammals to seek safety and regulation from our fellow humans. This is called co-regulation.”

By learning to listen to what our nervous systems are telling us, we can tap into the healing power that comes from listening to ourselves.

The beauty of learning to listen to our bodies is that we are partnering with God, through the Holy Spirit, to tend to the temple of the Holy Spirit, which is our physical body. By growing in awareness of the various ways our nervous system becomes dysregulated, we can attune more effectively to how God wants to bring healing.

In Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, he writes, “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the unseen things.” What if, by learning to tune into our nervous system and the signals it’s giving us, we actively participate in the renewal of our inner selves?

In the process of learning to listen, we are invited into a posture of non-judgmental awareness of our experience. James 2:13 says, “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” In Romans 12:1-2, Paul appeals to the church in Rome by the mercies of God to present their bodies to God as a living sacrifice.

By adopting a posture of non-judgmental awareness, we enter into an embodied experience of agreement with the mercy of God toward us. It is in this place of mercy that we can more fully understand what lies underneath the symptoms of our anxiety, depression, or feelings of being stuck. Symptoms always point to a root cause, and the same is true of our somatic experiences.

Authors Mann and Rabin go on to say, “…listening is about being present and paying attention to what is happening, not why it’s happening… Asking ‘what’ activates curiosity. When you are curious, you are primed to be in a regulating state for your nervous system. For most of us, the cognitive act of engaging with why is blended with judgement and limiting beliefs that are already ingrained in our brain. As you might imagine, judgement is not a safe regulating state for our nervous system.”

What the authors are getting at here is that learning to listen and developing curiosity are intricately linked to one another. To slightly reframe the quote above, we cannot be genuinely curious or willing to learn about something or someone if we are unable or unwilling to listen.

Listening requires us to intentionally focus our attention and will toward the subject that we want to learn or understand. This requires effort, as does learning to adopt the posture of mercy toward oneself.

“You already know this from your everyday life. We all long for connection and to be understood.” Equally so, we know how good and comforting it feels to have someone show genuine interest and curiosity in us. We know how good it feels to be joined or to have someone be with us in that way.

Simultaneously, we know how painful it feels to receive judgment from another person. It dysregulates us because it is a separation from the connection that we were made for with one another, with God, and with ourselves.

The Path Forward?

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what has been said. Our bodies hold a complex and intricately designed pathway of nerve cells that controls and coordinates bodily functions via electrical and chemical signals. This is our nervous system. Our nervous system is a pathway of connection throughout our entire body, involving our brains and all other major organs, flowing to our extremities. This system reflects the beauty and glory of God’s creation.

Our nervous systems send us signals, and at the same time, we are often unable to interpret these signals correctly. Due to the pace of modern life, we can struggle with symptoms like anxiety, depression, or feeling stuck, but are unsure of how to appropriately address them. One way that we can get underneath the surface of our symptoms and the narratives that our minds are telling us about them is to practice attuning to our nervous systems.

We practice attunement through pausing to intentionally focus our attention and will on four things: our breath, the actions our body wants to do, what sensations we feel in our bodies, and what emotions we are feeling in each moment. By taking time to intentionally listen to these cues, we begin to tap into the language of our nervous system.

When we tap into the language of our nervous systems through taking a posture of listening and non-judgmental awareness, we take an embodied posture of agreement to the mercy of God toward us. We can begin to tend to the house of the Holy Spirit inside of us, our physical bodies, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

As we do this, we can begin to grow in curiosity and awareness by asking ourselves what we are experiencing, instead of why we are experiencing it. Curiosity is a much safer place for our nervous system than judgment. Mercy triumphs over judgment.