Autonomic Nervous System ( ESSAY )

Your autonomic nervous system is the branch of your peripheral nervous system that regulates the functions of your internal organs, like your stomach, liver, and heart. It also controls your smooth and cardiac muscles, and your glands. All things that you do not consciously control, so yeah, you could say it has a lot of power over you. But thanks to it, you wouldn't need to command your brain to breath, to breath, the autonomic nervous system lifts that burden off of you. But the confusing thing about this system is that it's effect on your organs, muscle, and glands is by no means consistent. At any given moment, your autonomic nervous system is constantly making involuntary, fine-tuned adjustments to your body, based on the signals received by your central nervous system. This could mean changing your body temperature, or changing by what rate your heart is pumping blood. It's effects change, depending on the situation you're in, and also which part of your autonomic nervous system is in charge at that particular moment. Because this system that keeps you alive is actually run by TWO competing interests. Two divisions that serve the same organs, but they create different effects on them, one calming it down, while the other are making it more excited. The one that is dedicated to prepare you for activity, is the Sympathetic Nervous System, and the one that relaxes your organs is the Parasympathetic Nervous System. Together, they are what makes your body experience stress, fear, defiance, relaxation. So if there are an adventure novel, full of love, hatred, and tears that is being written in your body, it's probably being written by these two - the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.
Let's talk a sec about names. Contrary to it's comforting name, the sympathetic nervous system is what sounds your internal organs' alarm bells, therefore making your organs excited. It's the hardware behind the "fight or flight" response. Now the parasympathetic is for "resting and digesting", the opposite of the sympathetic system. It's responsible for conserving energy for later and maintaining your body. One more proof that you shouldn't judge or think about someone from their names or looks. Even though their basic components are basically the same, their physical structures are different in very important ways. Here are a list of those key differences which we'll be discussing later :

• Relative lengths of their fibers
• Location of their ganglia
• Sites of origins of neurons from the central nervous system

And those three chief differences can help explain why they act like the foils that they are. Foils, by the way is like contrasts, contrasts of each other.

P.S. : I mostly gathered the information to create this post from Crash Course. If you don't know 'em, check out their youtube channel, it's awesome, I'll promise you that.