Balance and Resilience

What’s the vagus nerve?

You’ve likely heard the term. It’s showing up everywhere from the New York Times to psychology and medical websites to YouTube to social media. It seems the vagus nerve is having a moment. And so are we.

It’s no secret that we’re living in intense times, and our nervous systems are adversely affected. This is where the vagus nerve comes in.

Named for the way it wanders (vagus in Latin means wanderer) through the body, the vagus nerve is a bundle of cranial nerves that branch off the brain stem and make their way through almost every internal organ and control many critical functions, including heart rate, digestion, immune system, and autonomic nervous system. It’s referred to as a communication superhighway that carries messages from the brain to the body and from the organs back to the brain. It’s real and relevant power is how it acts like a reset button for the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming ‘rest and digest’ response. Pretty important, right? So why are we hearing so much about it now?

Because we need all the resources we can get to keep ourselves healthy and balanced in a world that often feels like it’s not. We don’t need more pills and distractions to soothe ourselves; we need practical knowledge and tools to naturally, from the inside, reset and maintain equilibrium as needed. Understanding the vagus nerve and how to work with it is the right kind of intel at just the right time to support us through our modern lives.

The vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system evolved with the human species as a mechanism to maintain homeostasis or steadiness so we can move through our daily lives with ease and energy, discern threats and safety, respond accordingly, and return to balance. But as we all know, the world can often mess with our stasis, and it’s not always easy to remain unaffected or to loosen the grip of ‘fight-or-flight’ response. So we need methods to return to center, regulate, and maintain harmony.. The vagus nerve can help, as it’s meant for times like these.

Stimulation and Tone

Stimulation of the vagus nerve refers to influencing its functioning by down-regulating to calm or up-regulating to energize, as needed. We can’t actually directly stimulate the vagus nerve but rather can indirectly influence it through practices that change or control actions of key areas of the body - our stomach, diaphragm, lungs, inner ear, throat, and facial muscles.

Tone is the term used to indicate the health of the vagus nerve in relation to the parasympathetic nervous system, our response to stress, and how we return to homeostasis afterwards. Higher vagal tone means more resilience, less vagal tone means more depletion.

Stimulation allows us to regulate up or down when needed, while maintaining healthy tone allows us to remain resilient and vital. In our current world, it’s not enough to let our systems be pushed around and bombarded at will, expecting our bodies to handle it. We have to actively work to wake up our body/mind connection so we can better respond to our external environment and internal experience.

Ways to Stimulate and Tone

• Get into your body
  First step is to know your system, your responses, and when you’re off. Your body speaks to you in the language of sensation; tuning into sensation can provide insight into your current state. If you’re anxious, amped up, jittery, or unsettled, you need to down-regulate. If you’re lethargic, shut down, depressed, or feeling stuck, you need to up-regulate. Feel into your body, bringing awareness to how you feel and what you need.

• Breathe consciously
  One of the fastest ways to influence your nervous system is with the breath, which has the power to both down and up regulate. The vagus nerve travels through the stomach, diaphragm, and lungs, so we want all of these areas to move as we breathe. Further stimulation of the vagus nerve occurs when the breath is slowed down to 5-7 breaths per minute (from our typical 10-14 breaths per minute). Deep, slow breaths with longer exhales are most beneficial, calming the body and mind.

• Hum or chant
  The resonant vibration of humming and chanting can soothe your nervous system by stimulating the vagus nerve as it runs through the vocal cords and inner ear. Chanting om, as we often do in yoga, sends beneficial frequencies through the body, or a simple hum will do the trick to resonate through the throat and chest.

• Activate with cold water
  Splash cold water on your face to down-regulate. Cold water creates a reflex that can trigger a response in your body to slow heart rate, increase blood flow to the brain, and relax the body. To maintain tone of your system, try a cold blast of water at the end of your shower, allowing the water to run over your head and down your body.

• Do body-mind practices
  Yoga, meditation, breathwork, qi gong, and others, are all inherently designed to re-balance and maintain vital functioning of the vagus nerve and nervous system. But with all things, it’s not that you do them but how you do them that makes the difference. Embodied awareness and breath are key. A practice with quality guidance can regulate the nervous system and increase vagal tone, reducing stress while increasing flexibility, not just of the physical body but also of the nervous system, enhancing natural balance and resilience.

With the intention of traveling through life with as much presence, joy, sanity, and vitality as possible, becoming familiar with your vagus nerve and how to work with it is an asset that’s come at just the right time. Befriend this wanderer that touches every essential part of your body to up-level your human experience and steady yourself in our ever-changing world.

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More to come on the nervous system, polyvagal theory, and how it all connects to the subtle energy system of the body