Hi everyone and welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed exploring the content in module

1 last week and did some thinking about what health actually means to you and the
various factors that can impact our health.

This week we’re going to dive into the second module of the course and talk about
various body systems. We’ll talk about the nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, and
immune systems. So this week we’re going to focus more on the biological aspects of
health. However, I do want you to keep in mind throughout your exploration of this
week’s content that although we’re focusing primarily on body systems, those
systems are affected by not only biological, but psychological and social factors too.
Those ideas will be highlighted when we talk about how stress (which comes from
many biopsychosocial factors) impacts the body systems we’re going to learn about.
These systems together, and their link to the stress response, are implicated in many
of the chronic diseases we touched on in module 1 that are primarily related to
lifestyle factors, such as cardiovascular disease.

With this week’s content you can already start to see how interdisciplinary Health
Psychology is. A Health Psychologist needs to have knowledge of biology and how

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the body works to understand how various biopsychosocial factors work together to
impact the health of one’s body.

In this first video we’re going to focus on the nervous system. This information will
likely be review for many of you from PSYC 104 and probably other Psych or Biology
courses that you may have taken. But, we know that repetition is great for learning,
so here we go ☺
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The Systems of the Body

Cells Tissues

Tissues Organs

Organs Systems

11 body systems

An understanding of health requires a working knowledge of human physiology – the

study of the body’s functioning.
The body is made up of cells, cells group together to form tissues, tissues form
organs, and organs work together to form the body’s systems.
There are 11 systems in the body, depending on how you combine them (some
people combine musculoskeletal). Each system is comprised of a group of
interrelated organs with similar functions. (The integumentary system is the skin if
you weren’t sure about that one.)

Recall from module 1 we talked about how the biopsychosocial model takes a
systems approach to health, and that is a macrolevel approach; you can think of the
body the same way. The microlevel is what is happening at the level of the cells in the
body. What is happening at the microlevel can impact the macrolevel of a whole
body system.

Now, like pretty much all the content we’ll talk about in this course, I find the
functioning of the body fascinating. I always like to know HOW things work. I’m much
more likely to believe and follow a new health recommendation if someone explains

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physiologically how and why it works. This is the perspective I take on stress and
coping as well. I tend to find that when people (myself included) understand what is
happening in their body physiologically when they do a certain stress coping
intervention, and why it actually helps to reduce stress, they are more likely to
believe it will work for them, and that belief will make them more likely to actually
use that coping strategy. I have heard this response from many of my students that
started using coping strategies that they’d heard of before but didn’t understand why
they worked until taking my stress class. This idea can be applied more generally to
health as well. It’s important to understand how the systems of the body function in
order to understand why certain things we do or eat are healthy and certain things
are not. So you can see why it’s important that a Health Psychologist understands
how the body works. If you want to help someone change their behaviour to improve
their health, many times it can be motivating if that person understands exactly how
their behaviours are affecting their body negatively and how the changes in
behaviour you suggest can positively affect their body.

I am so fascinated by the body that towards the end of my PhD program I actually
applied to schools to become a pathologist’s assistant. A pathologist’s assistant is
basically the person that performs autopsies. I got into that program too. Then I
decided that I really loved teaching and I’d rather interact with live people. And now
here I am alone in my office talking to my computer. Such is life… ☺

Throughout the videos in this module, we will first briefly talk about how each body
system functions normally and then how the functioning of that system can be
disrupted, typically by stress. The systems of the body are all interconnected.
Disruption in one system can result in problems in a totally different system (again,
those micro and macrolevel ideas). We will see some examples of this cascade of
effects in this chapter. But then on the flip side, improving the functioning in one
system can often help improve the functioning of another system as well.
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Functional Medicine

Before we get started talking about the nervous system, I wanted to briefly mention
functional medicine. I wonder how many of you have heard this term before. I just
learned about this way to practice medicine a few years ago when I was looking into
my own health issue. Again, this topic is not meant to demonize our current health
care system but rather to point out how the focus on health could be a little different
and how Health Psychologists can help with that.

In conventional medicine, people often specialize in a particular system of the body.

However, as you go through the videos in this module, you’ll come across many
examples of how our body systems are intimately connected. So it’s important to
have an understanding of how the body works as a whole and how the systems work
together. The main thing I want to focus on here is that often in conventional
medicine, due to many factors, like the amount of time that doctors are able to
spend with patients, often the focus is on treating particular symptoms that the
patient comes in with, rather than trying to identify and rectify the underlying cause
of those symptoms. This is similar to the idea of reductionistic medicine. Or the idea
that you treat everyone with high blood pressure the same way, with blood pressure
medication, without really investigating the underlying causes of WHY they have high
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blood pressure. This is when an interdisciplinary team approach is really ideal, and
Health Psychologists can be important members of that team.

In functional medicine, the focus is on the functioning of the whole individual.

Functional medicine doctors spend much more time in appointments talking to their
patients about all kinds of aspects of their lives and their history, not just the specific
symptoms they came in for, to try to understand what might be the root cause of
those symptoms.

Ok, with those ideas in mind, of how all our body systems are intimately connected,
and affected by many factors outside just the biological, like psychological and social
factors, let’s start talking about our first body system, the control centre of
everything: our nervous system.
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Divisions of the Nervous System

LO1: What is Network of interconnected nerve fibres thatregulate important bodily

the function
of the functions
nervous
system? Composed of:
Central Nervous System (CNS):Brain + spinal cord
Peripheral Nervous System P
( eNS): Connects CNS to
organs/muscles
Somatic: Conscious control (e.g., voluntary muscles)
Autonomic:Unconscious control (e.g., organs)

Your nervous system is the interconnected nerve fibres that regulate basically all your
bodily functions. It has many divisions that do different things.

The two broad divisions of your nervous system, central and peripheral, allow
information from the external world to be perceived, processed, and responded to by
our bodies. These systems also allow information from our own internal worlds (our
thoughts) to affect our bodies.

Your central nervous system (CNS) is composed of your brain and your spinal cord.
This system receives information from the external world via your five senses,
processes and interprets that information, and then sends information to the rest of
your body systems for action. So your central nervous system is basically your
command post.

In this class, we’ll use PNS to refer to the parasympathetic nervous system, which
we’ll get to in a second, so we’re going to use PeNS to refer to the peripheral nervous
system. Your peripheral nervous system is the one that connects your central
nervous system to the rest of your body so that the commands that are coming from
the
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central nervous system can be carried out.

Your peripheral nervous system is further separated into two more divisions. Your
somatic nervous system is the part of your peripheral nervous system that is under
conscious control. This is the part of your nervous system that allows you to make
the movements you want to, like reaching for your tea mug and taking a drink. If you
remember back to Freud and conversion hysteria from module 1, Freud thought that
unconscious conflicts in the mind were actually expressed as physical symptoms
through the body’s somatic (or voluntary) nervous system. So it’s interesting that he
thought an unconscious conflict could affect a system that is supposed to be under
conscious control.

The other division of your peripheral nervous system is the autonomic nervous
system. This part of your nervous system is under unconscious control. This system
carries information from your brain to control things that you don’t have to think
about, like your heart beating, or your stomach digesting, or your glands secreting
hormones. These things are all controlled by our nervous system but we don’t have
to think about or decide to do those actions. Can you imagine if you had to
consciously decided to make your heart beat and your lungs breathe all day long.
Your literally wouldn’t be able to do anything else because all your brain power
would be used up just trying to keep those systems functioning.

This autonomic, or unconscious system, (you can think of it as automatic) was the
one that proponents of psychosomatic medicine thought was affected by mental or
emotional conflicts. And we’ve all probably had experiences to confirm this idea.
You’ll see what I mean on the next slide…
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Divisions of the Nervous System

LO1: What is
the function
of the
nervous
system?
Autonomic:Unconscious control (e.g., organs)
Sympathetic (SNS):Fight or flight (stress response)
Catabolic:Energy mobilizationand exertion
Parasympathetic (PNS):Rest and digest (calm repair)
Anabolic:Conservationof energy
Complementarysystems

Your autonomic nervous system is separated into two more divisions: the
sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system.

Your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is the one that revs your body up to face a
challenge. This system is like hitting the gas in your car. This system is called catabolic
because it deals with mobilizing energy. Catabolism basically means breaking down
larger molecules into smaller ones to release energy. This is why your sympathetic
system is called your fight or flight system. Your body is flooded with energy to either
fight your way out of an emergency or run away. This is also why your sympathetic
system is called your stress response system. This is the part of your nervous system
that is mobilized during stress, which is why we feel those typical stress responses of
things like a racing heart rate and increased breathing – those things all come from
extra stimulation and energy that has been mobilized to your cardiovascular and
respiratory systems to help you deal with whatever emergency is causing the stress.

So this is what I meant by we have all probably experienced an example of the

psychosomatic medicine idea of a mental or emotional conflict affecting the
autonomic nervous system. It happens whenever we get stressed when there is
no
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physical emergency. Like, if you are just sitting in a classroom writing an exam, there
is no physical emergency, but if that exam is stressing you out, your sympathetic
nervous system will be activated. So your mental conflict of exam stress affected your
autonomic nervous system. Proponents of psychosomatic medicine would say that if
that conflict continues for awhile, your body can be negatively affected physically just
by your mental conflict – in other words, stress negatively affects your body, which
we now know is absolutely true.

Ok, the last division of your nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system
(PNS). This is the rest and digest system. This system is like hitting the brakes in your
car. This system is called anabolic because it is concerned with conservation of
energy and building up your energy stores for the next time you need them. Anabolic
basically means assembling smaller pieces into larger molecules. Energy is stored in
those molecular bonds that can then be released when those molecules are broken
down. When our calm parasympathetic system is activated that’s when we can do
things like repair tissues from injury (build up molecules), or grow (also building
larger molecules).

The SNS and PNS are called complementary systems because they need to work
together. We need them both. However, they cannot both be activated at the same
time. We can’t break down things while we simultaneously repair them, just like it’s
not great to hit the gas and the brakes in your car at the same time. These are
opposite systems that each have to function some of the time to help keep the body
in balance. And remember, a lot of health is about balance. This idea of
complementary systems that can't be simultaneously activated is the cornerstone of
many stress coping strategies – they aim to activate the PNS because by doing so you
automatically shut down the stress-related SNS.
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SNS vs. PNS

This slide gives a good illustration of the opposing effects of the SNS and the PNS on
different organs affected by the stress response. Our stress response system
originally developed early in evolutionary time to help us deal with physical threats
and emergencies, so each of the things that happen to your body during your stress
response are evolutionarily adaptive to help you deal with a physical threat or
emergency.

Here is a run down of the things on this slide affected by your stress response (SNS):
1) Pupils dilate (to help you take in more light and see better)
2) Salivation is inhibited (think dry mouth when you’re nervous). Salivation is used
for digestion. You’re not focused on digesting things when you’re in an
emergency. 3) Heart beat accelerates (to pump more blood to your body to help
you fight or run away)
4) Digestion is inhibited (no need to digest during an emergency)
5) Adrenaline is secreted (to give you energy to run or fight)
6) Orgasm is stimulated. Ok, this one doesn’t likely help you out in an emergency, but
our reproductive systems also involve a delicate interplay of our SNS and PNS.
The parasympathetic system must be activated to achieve arousal, so you have to
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be relaxed, and then as things get more exciting and you get closer to climax, the
sympathetic system switches on to achieve orgasm. If you think about it, leading up
to orgasm, one typically experiences the same heavy breathing and racing heart rate
that one experiences during stress.

A student in the first stress class I ever taught came up with a good way to remember
which nervous system is involved in which aspect of the reproductive system: the
PNS is to point (arousal), and the SNS is to shoot (orgasm).

Ok, then on the flip side, your parasympathetic system has the opposite effect to all
those things your SNS did:
Pupils constrict, salivation is stimulated so digestion can take place, heart rate is
decreased so you can relax, and digestion is stimulated so you can grow.

We’ve seen a lot of examples on this slide of how the nervous system obviously
interacts with many other body systems, getting back to that idea that health comes
from a complex interplay of many factors, and psychological and social factors, such
as those related to stress, can affect biological factors, like our nervous system, which
then impacts all the other systems in our body. In your text you’ll also find many
examples of health issues that can arise due to the nervous system not functioning
optimally, like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease, and Multiple Sclerosis.

This brings us to the end of our tour through the nervous system and the role it plays
in our stress response. I’ll see you in the next video, where we’ll talk about the
endocrine system and how that system also plays an important role in our stress
response. See you there…
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