What do the words Sympathetic and Parasympathetic systems in my body mean?

I keep hearing about SYMPATHETIC & PARASYMPATHETIC systems in my body; what does this even mean?

The sympathetic, which fires up in fight and flight, and it has the parasympathetic, which calms us down during rest and digest. So the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for challenges, for stress, for overload, and the parasympathetic prepares the body or brings the body through rest, digest, recovery and healing.

And the idea is that those two systems work ‘in sync’ with each other.

So ideally, those two systems need to operate in balance, in tandem. (IN SYNC) We also don’t need to continuously have rest and digest because that's no good either. This idea that we're balancing between sympathetic parasympathetic, sympathetic parasympathetic, sympathetic so fight and flight when it's needed, rest and digest when it's appropriate, and the two work in tandem together.

So the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for challenges, stress, overload, and the parasympathetic prepares the body or brings the body through rest, digest, recovery and healing. So you can get a sense that in order to navigate the challenges of life, we need them both to work in tandem.

The two opposing forces will continuously fluctuate because we need them both to keep us safe and to protect from various threats, but in balance and in tandem, where when appropriate, they kick in. And if you're in a heightened state of fight or flight all the time, even when it's not needed, if you imagine where did our fight and flight symptoms come from? And it would have been from our predecessors when we were hunter-gatherers and when we were trying to survive in the wild.

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