A rainy day and the nervous system.

Have you considered building your nervous system?

A progression of spring in Minnesota.

It’s a beautifully rainy day. Copper and I got caught out on our walk this morning; we arrived back sprinkled. I love, love rainy days. Have I said? And there have been far too few of them.

I feel more focused and centered on rainy days. Calm, embodied. Whereas on sunny days I feel scattered and overwhelmed. Heavy. Stiff. This apexes on the day before rain when despite the many tools I use to bring ease into my body, I become so stiff I can hardly move, and then finally the rain falls and I am released.

I know this is backward to popular experience, most come alive in the sun. They come out of the house and head for the parks or the beaches. They laugh, they dance, they dig their toes in the sand or run through sprinklers. At least this is what I imagine you all doing while I pull the shades and put my head under the blanket.

There are a handful of us who have been quietly relishing rainy days. Some feel guilty about it, like they’re wasting the sunny days of summer or as if they’re not allowed to keep cool and hunker down with a book indoors even if they don’t like being in the heat.

That anyone truly loves sweating their balls off, astonishes me.

I, on the other hand, have come to embrace it. I’ve harbored big dreams of someday living in Scotland where, according to the weather apps, the average highs through the summer hover at 65. Last July Edinburgh’s monthly high was 73. September seems to have seen the hottest day coming in at 79 degrees. And it rains nearly half the summer. Perfect.

And if I need to warm up, I can head down to Sicily or Portugal for a holiday. Obvs.

I have been developing an ever-evolving theory on this phenomenon for years.

I first noticed the pattern in 2015-16. The stiffness and mood shifts that happen just before a rain in northern MN were hard to ignore. I theorized that change in barometric pressure created inflammation in my body. There are a number of studies, including a Tufts study on cadavers! mentioned in an article on Creaky Joints, a digital community in support of arthritis sufferers, that support this theory (there are of course just as many studies in which folks who suffer joint pain in different climates report no change in pain or inflammation with changes in temps or weather).

Whether or not my theory on barometric pressure can be proved, of course, hardly matters, if inflammation is what I experience, and I do. According to research analyzed by Dr. Edward Bullmore in The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression, we now know inflammation is an underlying cause of depression, of some depressions? And inflammation is higher in adults who experienced childhood trauma. This has been researched since at least the 90s, but the articles were buried in obscure medical journals because we were so Prozac nation. Shrug.

I have been practicing yoga asana and meditation off and on for 20 years. And, as I started to consider my creative practices in 2021, I also began considering more seriously my body-mind practices as well.

Last summer, I was introduced to the concept of “building a nervous system” in an interview. The interviewee said that she realized that she needed to build a nervous system that could process all the energy she was experiencing as an energy worker. This sparked an intuitive chord and I began a deep dive. Though, of course, we both already had nervous systems, I knew mine was easily triggered and the concept of strengthening or re-building, hadn’t previously occurred to me. Let alone that I had any control or influence over it.

I watched interviews with Stephen Porges, Ph.D., the researcher who developed the Polyvagal Theory on trauma, and Dr. Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. author of Waking the Tiger and developer of Somatic Experiencing therapy, a guided technique in which a therapist supports a client toward Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) regulation, among others. I read on and tried out different practices known to regulate the ANS and release stored emotional energy in the body.

In reality, many of the things I had already been doing were regulating my ANS, but pointing myself in this direction with more intention and awareness felt like a necessary and important path. ANS dysregulation is a common symptom of those of us who are neurodivergent and I began to wonder how regulated my ANS could get.

It became my priority:

A ghost on a quest for beauty

This is becoming a series. Installment two is here:

How does the Nervous System respond?

Sincerely,