How the Body Works Nervous Endocrine

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How the Body Works: Overview of the Nervous and Endocrine Systems

Posted ByDr. Ben Kim on Nov 12, 2009

Natural Health Care

A thorough discussion of how your body works best begins with an overview of yournervous and endocrine systems, as these two organ systems act as co-directors of all of the activities

that occur in your body.

To put it simply, your nervous and endocrine systems continuously monitor the well-being of each of th

billions of cells in your body, and they continuously take action through messenger systems to keep alof your cells as healthy as possible.

A Key Difference in How Your Nervous and Endocrine Systems Work

Though your nervous and endocrine systems share the director's seat of your body, they fulfill their rolin completely different ways.

Your nervous system senses and controls every part of your body through its many nerves. Sensory

receptors located throughout your body constantly send information through nerves to your brain; youbrain digests this information; your brain then decides on appropriate action, and executes the action b

sending additional information out to the target cells through other nerves.

For example, if you accidentally touch a hot pan, sensory receptors register pain almost instantaneouslthis information travels through nerves to reach your brain, your brain understands that your hand is idanger of being injured in its current position, and your brain sends information down other nerves tha

tells your muscles to jerk your hand away from the pan.

As you almost certainly know from real life experience, transmission of information throughout your

nervous system can occur within milliseconds. But it can also occur at a slower pace - good examples oslower and deliberate activity within your nervous system are all of the activities that must take place

within your sensory receptors, nerves, brain, and muscles when you park your car in your driveway,type an e-mail, wash vegetables, take a shower, or hit a tennis ball.

Your endocrine system consists of a number of glands that produce and secrete hormones that maketheir way into your bloodstream. Once in your bloodstream, your hormones travel through your body

and trigger specific actions whenever they encounter cells that display compatible receptors.

Because your endocrine system monitors and controls the well-being of your cells via your circulatorysystem, it generally works at a slower pace than your nervous system, sometimes taking hours to

produce a desired effect as a hormone reaches its target destination and carries out its job.

For example, if your blood volume decreases for any reason (like dehydration), your endocrine systemwill sense this and call your kidneys, liver, lungs, adrenal glands, and blood vessels to action, with the

end result being an increase in blood volume.

So your nervous system uses sensory receptors, nerves, and your brain to monitor and control the welbeing of all of your cells, while your endocrine system uses your blood circulatory system to accomplis

the same thing. Your nervous system operates at lightning speed, while your endocrine system generalworks more slowly to create changes in your biochemistry.

Strands of One Big Web

Your nervous and endocrine systems are highly interdependent in behavior, much like all the strands oa spider web are intimately connected in stability and behavior.
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The interdependent relationship between your nervous and endocrine systems begins in a tiny area of

tissue in your brain called your hypothalamus.

Your hypothalamus is only about as large as a grape, and can be viewed as the micro-processing chipthat controls almost all of your body's external and internal activities. Your hypothalamus receives

information from all of the major areas of your brain, your major organs, and your eyes, and it registesensations like pain, temperature, hunger, thirst, lust, stress, fear, and anger.

Once your hypothalamus registers incoming information and decides what your body needs to best

survive and be healthy, it uses your autonomic nervous system to affect the behavior of all of your

major organs. Examples of such effects are increased heart and lung rates, increased blood flow to youskeletal muscles or digestive organs, changes in how much light enters your eyes and how well your

eyes can focus on distant objects, production of sweat or shivers, and arousal of sexual organs.

Your hypothalamus also produces a number of different hormones that directly impact your pituitarygland, which is about the size of a green pea, and is located just below your hypothalamus.

Amazingly, your pea-size pituitary gland is the chief gland of your endocrine system; it has two distincportions that produce and secrete hormones that govern the activities and well-being of all of your orgasystems. Actually, because your hypothalamus governs the activities of your pituitary gland, it may bemore accurate to call your hypothalamus the master gland of your endocrine system. But technically,

your hypothalamus is considered to be specialized neuroendocrine tissue because of its unique ability taffect both your nervous and endocrine systems.

Ultimately, what's important to know is this:

Together, your hypothalamus and pituitary gland have significant, ongoing influence overevery other component of your endocrine system.

"Other components" includes your thyroid gland, parathyroid glands, pineal gland, adrenal glands, andall organs and tissues that secrete hormones - these organs and tissues include your kidneys, liver,

stomach, small intestine, pancreas, heart, skin, thymus, and fat tissue. The ovaries, testes, and placen

also secrete hormones, and are considered to be important components of the endocrine system.

The Big PictureIn order get a sense of how your nervous and endocrine systems work together to keep you well,

consider the example of hiking in a national park somewhere in Alaska late at night and coming upon a

hungry grizzly bear.

As soon as your eyes detect the bear and your brain understands the bear's desire to make you her nexmeal, your hypothalamus uses your autonomic nervous system to immediately prepare your eyes to sebetter, your brain to think more quickly, and your heart, lungs, and large skeletal muscles to allow yo

to run faster or fight with more strength.

Interestingly, your autonomic nervous system accomplishes some of the above by stimulating therelease of epinephrine and norepinephrine from the inner portion of your adrenal glands - this is yet

another way in which your nervous and endocrine systems are intertwined in their roles as governors oall of your physiological activities.

Through your endocrine system, your hypothalamus stimulates the release of glucocorticoids (mainlycortisol) from the outer portion of your adrenal glands. Glucocorticoids increase the production of

glucose, which ensures adequate availability of fuel to fight or run away from the bear.

Here are the main points to take away from this article:

All of your nervous and endocrine system's responses to physical danger also occur when youexperience any type of emotional stress - to a lesser degree than in the example of encountering a

grizzly, but ultimately, all of your cells are exposed to the same stress-related neurotransmitters andhormones whenever you are feeling emotionally stressed.


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So the result of ineffectively managing emotional stress over a long period of time is premature aging

and disease due to chronically being in fight-flight mode.

Also, in most cases, it doesn't make any sense to try to address just one particular problem within younervous or endocrine systems with a specific remedy, like medication or a nutritional supplement. For

example, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease are all systemic neurological challengthat are affected by every food that you eat, every hour of fatigue that you experience, and every

emotion that courses through and touches every cell in your mind and body.

The same goes for almost all endocrine-related health challenges. For example, it's not possible to

isolate the health status of your thyroid gland, to identify one, two, or five factors that are contributingto thyroid dysfunction. Every facet of your existence affects the health of your thyroid gland, and any

diligent and well-thought out attempt to address real thyroid dysfunction must bring into consideratioall main causes of disease and dysfunction.

Put another way, the health of every component of your nervous and endocrine systems depend on youoverall health status and how healthy all of your organ systems are; the health of each of your body

parts cannot be compartmentalized.

Of course, there can be focal causes of specific conditions, like the case of poor upper body posturecreating shoulder impingement syndrome, or the case of an iodine deficiency resulting in enlargement o

your thyroid gland (called a goiter).

So it does pay to have unusual symptoms of discomfort that you can't account for evaluated by aphysician. But regardless of whether one specific cause is identified or not, you'll always stand a good

chance of experiencing improvement by ensuring that you are earning good overall health through

healthy living.

Next in this series on how your body works, we'll look at some concrete steps that you can take to helsupport the health of your nervous and endocrine systems.

Other Articles in this Series:

How the Body Works: Overview of Organ Systems

How the Body Works: Overview of the Integumentary System (Skin)

Related Articles:

Full Body Cleanse Program

Main Causes of Disease and Dysfunction

How Chronic Emotional Stress Can Hurt Your Health
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How the Body Works Nervous Endocrine