“You’re Getting on My Nerves!” – 5 Signs of a Restricted Nervous System
Updated: Apr 15, 2025
Dr. Keelin Regan-Reed, PT, DPT, is often referred to as the "Nerve Whisperer" by her clients and has been called a "Human MRI" by her peers. She is an Orthopedic and Neural Manual Physical Therapist specializing in Neural Manipulation and the published author of Fix It Yourself! A Self Help Guide To Treating Common Muscular Aches And Pains.
Do you notice muscles in your arms or legs that are smaller on one side than the other? Do you have a feeling of tightness or pressure in various parts of your body? Do you suffer from constipation or GI disruptions without explanation?
You most likely have nerves throughout your body that are stuck, strained, or compressed. Most everyone has restrictions in their nervous system. It’s something we all experience but is often overlooked, misdiagnosed, or unexplained. However, there are manual techniques that can treat nerve dysfunctions.
What causes a restricted nervous system?
Our peripheral nerves are the most exposed part of the nervous system. They are vulnerable to mechanical dysfunction through direct or indirect traumas. However, nerves are extremely elastic. Their ability to handle tension and pull before rupturing is important in understanding their protection. Understanding the tensile strength of nerves in relation to certain injuries shows how important their elasticity is for their protection.
Nerves are always under constant internal tension. As you stretch and move, your nerves need to move along with your joint and muscle mobility. They have to be able to glide and slide between muscles, organs, fascia, and other tissues in our body. They are made up of 80% water and electrolytes. This means if you experience dehydration, there is a direct effect on your nervous system. That is why we experience symptoms like confusion, headaches, muscle cramps, GI symptoms, and changes in heart rate and blood pressure when we become dehydrated.
Nerves can experience many types of injuries or stress. They can be compressed (like putting a kink in a hose), overstretched (like pulling a rubber band too tight), cut or severed (during surgery or an accident), inflamed (due to a virus or bacterial infection), or become stuck or sticky (like a piece of floss between your teeth that doesn’t come out). A nerve will grow 1 mm per day if cut or severed. Nerves can also tolerate an 8% to 15% stretch (elongation) of their length before starting to experience a 50% to 80% decrease in blood flow.¹
They are prone to injury but are also wonderfully vascularized, meaning they have amazing blood flow for tissue healing. Because of this, they are perfect soft tissues for manual treatment to promote healing.
Not every bone injury leads to a fracture or dislocation that is then seen by an X-ray. From a doctor's medical standpoint, patients are often considered to be perfectly healthy and fine (due to the negative imaging), even though they are not feeling and functioning the same as they were before experiencing the trauma. Often, the trauma happens to completely different tissues, like nerves. Nerves may be overlooked because we can’t see these injuries on imaging, and early symptoms of nerve damage may not be present.
Traumatic nerve lesions and injuries typically do not result in a recognizable, well-defined clinical picture from diagnostic imaging, and symptoms are often overlooked. You can have a functional nerve lesion or injury develop after neurological diseases like herpes zoster (chickenpox/shingles), or as a result of long-term posture imbalances (forward head or rounded shoulders from years of computer and desk work). More frequently, we experience injuries caused by mechanical forces like friction, pressure or compression, and traction (stretch).
What is important to remember is that to bring about a nerve lesion, it does not have to be a severe injury. Often, it results from repeated microtraumas. With correct diagnostic evaluation, testing, and listening to a patient's complete history, we can make accurate diagnoses without fancy imaging or extensive nerve testing.
5 signs our nervous system is restricted
1. Numbness and tingling anywhere in the body
Nerves are a distinctive soft tissue that, when damaged or dysfunctional, have a unique set of symptoms that are only experienced if a nerve is involved. These symptoms can range from numbness, tingling, burning, sharp and pinprick-like sensations, to radicular pain (running or shooting down or along your limb or trunk).
2. Anxiety, irritability, and mood disturbances
Your autonomic nervous system can become disrupted and restricted just like your motor muscular neuro-system. The symptoms are just different due to the function of the nerve that is involved. If your vagus nerve is involved, many different types of symptoms can manifest, from GI to heart, breathing and lungs, and mood disorders.
3. GI symptoms
Digestive issues, nausea, diarrhea, and constipation are just a few things that can become disrupted. Food irritabilities, nutrient absorption in the gut, and gut biome balance can all become dysfunctional. Remember, there are innervations throughout your entire body, including the colon and small intestines. They contain a significant number of nerve endings along their entire course. If these become dysfunctional, it can cause anything from food and nutrient absorption problems to disruption of healthy gut microbiome development and stability.
4. Headaches, sinus pressure, dizziness, sensory changes with smell, hearing, or vision
Your cranial nerves that exit at your brainstem are primarily involved in providing you with all of your senses and the innervation of your facial and eye muscles. When we get a cold or viral infection, this can disrupt our sinus cavity. The infection and stuffiness we experience also create pressure along the cranial nerves that exit around our face, ears, neck, and sinus cavity. When this happens, compression of the cranial nerves can then lead to secondary complications like headaches, pressure changes in the face, and vision symptoms.
5. Clumsiness, balance changes, coordination changes
Our balance comes from some important structures in our body like our cerebellum at the base of the brain, our vestibular system, our proprioception, and our vision. When these areas are affected, balance and coordination changes can be experienced. This can happen slowly over time, with slight changes that add up.
Nerve innervation, control, and regulation
There is nothing in your body that doesn’t have an innervation (nerve connection). Every cell, tissue, and bone requires a nerve to function. All your organs and systems, as well as your musculoskeletal system, have a nerve that controls and/or regulates your body somehow. Our nerves are developed in utero before our hearts. It’s the nerve impulse that causes the heart to beat. Nerves are the very first system to be developed in utero.
If we can wrap our heads around how valuable and important our nerves are in shaping the functions of our body, then we can understand how there might be a restriction, compression, inflammation, cut, or separation of a nerve that is affecting our system from working at its best.
Your brain is the grand central station where everything starts from and returns to. Imagine a multi-lane highway (spinal cord) being the commuter system that takes the nerve impulse down to the body part. This nerve impulse is what allows you to take a breath, create a heartbeat, stimulate your colon to move your breakfast and absorb the nutrients, and signal your muscles to contract so you can climb out of bed and start your day.
Now, imagine a traffic jam or accident that stops the flow of traffic and communication. Information can’t get back to the grand central station, your brain. Emergency vehicles can’t get to the accident site. This metaphor describes the healthy fluids, cells, and blood supply that should be able to access the damaged area of the body.
It doesn’t have to be completely blocked to be affected. Sometimes, it can just be slow and congested (like highway morning traffic), so nothing is able to move fluidly and quickly. The nerve symptoms can then be felt as tingling, numbness, GI movement issues, breathing or heart rate issues, muscle weakness, coordination and balance loss, mental clarity problems, or anxiety.
Understand there are people out there who are specifically trained and can treat this with manual techniques very successfully. It’s finding them that can be tricky. Knowing we are out there and that something can be done is the first step!
Neural manipulation
Understanding the impact of a restricted nervous system and identifying if you may have restricted nerves gives clarity on why Neural Manipulation is beneficial and has a tremendous impact on healing. Read 5 Incredible Health Improvements Through Nerve Manipulation Technique to learn more.
Read more from Dr. Keelin Regan-Reed
Dr. Keelin Regan-Reed PT, DPT, Orthopedic and Neural Manual Physical Therapist
Dr. Keelin Regan-Reed PT, DPT, is a licensed manual Doctor of Physical Therapy specializing in Neural Manipulation. She is able to "listen" to the cranial rhythm in the brain and body by following the cerebral spinal fluid flow as it works around the brain and spinal cord to the peripheral nerves throughout the body. Just like a clinician can "feel" for the pulse in your wrist to listen to your blood flow and heartbeat, the fluid of the brain and nerves has a similar "feel" of pressure changes. Our bodies hug around lesions and restrictions, thus changing the rhythm of the fluid. Dr. Keelin can detect this change and follow where the lesion is and make the necessary corrections and/or releases so the body can then heal on its own.
References:
Clark W.L., Trumble T.E., Swiontkowski M.F., Tencer A.F. Nerve tension and blood flow in a rat model of immediate and delayed repairs. The Journal of Hand Surgery. 1992;17(4):677–687. doi: 10.1016/0363-5023(92)90316-h. [DOI] [PubMed]
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