Well-being: Can you “heal” your nervous system? | ELLE Quebec Magazine

Well-being: Can you “heal” your nervous system?

Pandemic, wars, genocides, inflation, climate crisis… When we look at the state of the world, it’s no wonder most people are stressed.. According to Statistics Canada, most days are perceived as being “fairly or extremely stressful” by a quarter of Canadians aged 18 to 64. Inner peace, for ordinary mortals caught up in the metro-work-sleep whirlwind, often seems unattainable. In addition to making us see life in a dim light and giving us unpleasant butterflies in our stomachs, stress and anxiety are associated with a multitude of physical symptoms, sometimes significant: palpitations, chest pain, digestive problems… and even debilitating chronic pain, which is still relatively little known and not taken seriously by doctors (especially when experienced by women). To remedy this, we can turn to psychotherapy. But private consultations are very expensive and are inaccessible for a large part of the population; and in the public sector, it is known, waiting lists are endless and resources are limited. In short, people need help, but resources are lacking.

In the blind spot of traditional therapy, a myriad of supposedly miraculous solutions land on our news feeds every day by promising us to “heal our nervous system” — and therefore increase our well-being tenfold and reduce our stress and anxieties: self-massage, eye movement therapy, binaural percussion, cortisol regulating diet, cardiac coherence… These terms abound on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and new applications and electronic gadgets to stimulate the vagus nerve or to optimize meditation sessions are proliferating.