Nervous System Mastery: Getting curious with our wiring and synchronicity

Photo by Niklas Liniger on Unsplash

Many animals enter the world pretty much with their brain architecture set to control their bodies and navigate the world. Humans don’t, we are born helpless. We can take approximately 25 years to get the initial brain wiring ship shape. Our environment and biology are both equally important in dictating what neuronal connections and networks are created and strengthened. They are also personal to each individual brain, cultivating our sense of self.

But let’s look at this more closely by introducing something called misattunement. Simply put it is when we are out of sync with others, our needs are not noticed, acknowledged or met. Now reconsider it through the eyes of a baby or child, who has no intellectual understanding. But instinctively craves the basic needs such as milk, shelter, warmth and the more complex like love, synchronicity, trust and safety.

Here are some simple examples:

Leaving a baby to cry it out alone. The baby senses and perceives no one will help and that there is no healthy synchronicity. The baby’s safety network has laid down this pattern without cognition. If a baby had intellectual thought and language it would probably be thinking ‘its best I stop crying, shut down and disconnect’.

A child says ‘I am hungry’. The response ‘ you are not hungry, you are always saying you are hungry’. The response from the primary care giver is misattuned to the basic need.

A child says ‘I’m scared’. The response ‘ don’t be stupid, you really need to grow up and behave’. The response from the primary care giver is totally out of sync, ignoring the more complex need about emotional security around how they feel and sense.

If there is significant misattunement during these crucial years the brain, nervous system and body becomes ‘emotionally’ malnourished. As a result the brain may well pick (out of conscious control) distinct coping strategies that carry through life. For example people pleasing because without conscious awareness the brain and body mistakenly believes ‘my needs don’t matter, so I will be really helpful to everyone else and not worry about myself’. Or other strategies could be dissociation, or anger or avoidance.

It probably won’t surprise you to read that burn out cycles, anxiety, depression, addictions and many other mental health challenges may be linked to misattunement. However, remember the beauty and wonder of the brain is with the ‘wiring’, via neuroplasticity, can establish new pathways to deploy new healthier strategies and find synchronicity.

The key point here we are more than intellectual thought. The brain is beautifully entangled embracing emotion, the senses, different types of memory, perception, biology, electrochemical reactions, the past, the present and cognition. Let’s utilise this to find a kinder and more sustainable world, something that is needed more than ever.