How Trauma Gets Trapped in Your Body: Part 1 the Vagus Nerve

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to part one of three, how trauma gets trapped in your body. In this video, we're going to be learning about the vagus nerve. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. As I said, all we're going to really cover in this video is learning about what the vagus nerve is and what it does. In part three, we'll start talking about how to improve the functioning of the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve. A lot of people have started talking about the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve. But what is it? The vagus nerve is actually a family of neural pathways that carry information both to and from the brain. And I think of it kind of like the body's email system or messenger system. It is the best analogy I can really make. So the vagus nerve takes in sensory information either directly or by connection with other nerves like the trigeminal nerve, and it reports it to the brain. And the brain says, okay, this is what I'm going to do with this information, or this is what we need to do with this information. And the vagus nerve takes that information and it sends it back out through the body and it tells the body what to do. In a study that they did many, many years ago. Now, granted it was with rats, but it was a very interesting study where they alter the microbio rats. And they found that when they had rats that had their vagus nerve severed, altering the gut microbiome did not affect their behavior. But in rats in which the vagus nerve was still intact, alterations in the gut microbiome actually produced alterations in behavior. And they did this same simply in. In both groups of rats by feeding them probiotics. So I thought that was kind of interesting how the vagus nerve acts as that messenger system. The vagus nerve is connected to most bodily systems. Wow. Either directly or indirectly, it's called the vagus nerve. In vagus. I think it's Latin for wandering. And it does. I'll show you a picture in a minute. The vagus nerve can also trigger what's called the orienting reflex. Have you ever been in a situation? I was today. It was cloudy this morning and I was standing in the hallway, and all of a sudden it started to get bright sunshiny outside. And my attention suddenly turned to see what was going on because I noticed a change. And the orienting reflex is. Is what we do when our sensory organs, when our body notices a change in the environment that's taken in reported to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve says, hey, something's new. And it triggers that orienting response, the orienting reflex. We're going to go into in much greater depth in part two of this three part series. So let's take a look at really where the vagus nerve is. And I wasn't kidding when I said everywhere. The green line represents the vagus nerve and it goes, it attaches to your trigeminal nerve, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is in your face and head. But it also is responsible or implicated in swallowing and talking pharyngeal branch. It connects to your heart, it connects to your gut, it connects to your liver and your spleen and your kidneys and your digestive system. So let's think about that for a second. What happens when you get stressed? When that HPA axis gets kicked off? The vagus nerve tells all of those organs, hey, threat, warning, fight or flee. So what happens? The heart rate increases, we may start salivating more, we start breathing more quickly most of the time. And our gut microbiome changes, especially if the stress is ongoing. There's an ongoing change, but there are incremental or minute changes even with a acute stressor. And then down in our intestines we see the vagus nerve communicating that there's a threat. So what happens in your intestines? Everything speeds up. It's not time to rest and digest, it's time to fight or flee. So we're going to push that stuff out, which when people get anxious, they tend to have more ibs, more irritable bowel, more flatulence, more diarrhea, to, you know, I don't want to get too graphic for you, but all of this, or a lot of this, is controlled by the vagus nerve. So we do want to recognize that when our vagus nerve is not behaving helpfully, then it can trigger a variety of symptoms throughout our body. Now, I said earlier, we're going to talk about the trigeminal nerve. And the trigeminal nerve connects to the vagus nerve and the trigeminal nerve innervates our face in certain theories. They talk about your third eye up here and your ophthalmolog zone nerve really comes up right between your eyes and that communicates to your vagus nerve. So if you raise your eyebrows like you're curious about something that communicates to your vagus nerve, hey, that's a curious look. If you scowl, that communicates to your vagus nerve. There might be a threat going on when you Smile, your maxillary zone areas of the trigeminal nerve are triggered, and that tells the vagus nerve, hey, this person is smiling. So there must be something positive going on. Likewise, when you activate those frown muscles, it communicates again to the vagus nerve what's going on. The person is making certain movements and stimulating the vagus nerve by virtue of the set of muscles that it's innervating. And finally, the auricular branches of the vagus nerve. And auricular means ear. And there's a lot of information on auricular stimulation of the vagus nerve using tens units, which again, we're going to talk about in part three. But I do want you to recognize, and I have a video on vagus nerve. Massage that your vagus nerve. And you can see in the picture probably better than you can see me just pointing to my ear. But on the outer side of your ear, there's a couple of points. So massaging there, kind of under where your ear rolls, if you want to call it massaging there, and then inside, in the concave area of your ear, there are also other points. And then on what's called the tragus, which is the little flap of skin that covers your ear hole, for lack of a better word, that is also innervated. So all through your ear, there are nerves that are activated, parts of the vagus nerve that are activated. So when we stimulate those, we theoretically are activating the rest and digest part of the vagus nerve. So ultimately, what's important to know about the vagus nerve is that it runs throughout your body, taking in sensory information and sending it to the brain to find out what to do. How does this relate to trauma? Well, when you experience trauma, the brain learns from that and creates what we've called in other videos, schema or shortcuts about when this situation occurs. It's a threat. Therefore, when the body receives information, when the sensory organs pick up information or triggers for that trauma, the vagus nerve sends that information up to the brain. And the brain says, oh, I know what this means. In the past, when we've encountered this smell or this sight or this place, it's meant really bad mojo. So I'm going to trigger the stress response. All of this takes place in what we call our default mode network or our autopilot network. And one of the tricks, and I know I'm getting ahead of myself, one of the tricks that is important or tools, I guess that's important for recalibrating the vagus nerve and the orienting reflex is to help the person learn how to deactivate that autopilot and activate what they call the executive control network. Or basically, our higher order thinking, our ability to say, okay, in the past, this really sucked in the present, am I safe? Is there still a threat? What's going on? But all of this relies on the vagus nerve being able to effectively communicate throughout our body.