Taming the Vagus Nerve with Dr. Doni! | How Humans Heal Podcast

Hi, and welcome to How Humans heal. I am Dr. Donni Wilson, and today I want to talk through with you all about the vagus nerve. I get asked about this all the time by patients and I talk about it all the time. So I want to make sure you have the information as well. So I'm going to start by reading from my new book, Master your Stress, Reset yout Health, where I talk about the vagus nerve quite a lot, starting on page 16. And I say the gut brain axis is a perfect example of how the mind and body are completely interconnected and how communication travels in both directions. The vagus nerve is a main part of the parasympathetic nervous system and is known as the longest nerve in the body structure, stretching from the brain down to the digestive system. It's essentially a superhighway.

Containing over 100,000 nerve fibers with signals going back and forth with vital information. It's a key element of the gut brain connection, and especially because the brain sends information to the gut, and in return, the gut can send information back to the brain. That is why the gut is considered the second brain and is a regulator of so many functions in the body.

So this vagus nerve, it's a cranial nerve, what we call a cranial nerve. It goes from the brain, as I said, down to the digestion. It's the longest nerve in the body, and it not only goes to the digestion, but it also goes to the heart and the lungs, and it affects many other functions. Actually, usually the way we describe the vagus nerve in science and biology is that it controls the involuntary functions in our body. So it's actually doing the stuff that we don't think about. It's actually making it so we don't have to think about things like breathing. Breathing and our heart beating happens automatically for us. Same with different actions in our immune system, saliva production, even communication. That has to do with speech and taste and urine as well. So the vagus is working behind the scenes, doing a lot of stuff to help us stay functioning day in and day out. When we say parasympathetic nervous system, that's opposite to the sympathetic nervous system, which maybe you've heard of. The sympathetic nervous system is what we usually think of as the fight or flight response to stress. So when a stress happens, our body turns on the fight or flight response, making adrenaline and sending out stress signals through all of these same places. The heart, the lungs, the digestion. Right. Everything gets a stress signal. And so when the sympathetic nervous system is on the parasympathetic is off. The issue is that so much of the time we essentially live our lives day in and day out in a constant sympathetic state, constantly signaling our stress response. And then we don't get as much of time in the parasympathetic state. And the parasympathetic state is where we actually get to digest our food and do other recovery activities. So what is optimal is a balance being able to go into sympathetic and back into parasympathetic. That's actually called vagal tone, is your ability to go back and forth between parasympathetic and sympathetic. It's not that you want to just stay and sympathetic either. You want to be able to respond to stress and then recover from stress and to do that very easily. And so what we sometimes can do is we can actually monitor our ability to go from sympathetic to parasympathetic in what is considered the. Well, it's a heart rate monitor. It's the. Actually, it's the heart rate variability. So even though we usually think of our heart rate as, you know, a single beat in a regular pattern, if you look closely, there's actually a little bit of variability in our heart rate. And so that's what we call heart rate variability. And it's in looking closely at the heart rate variability that we can identify this.

Flexibility between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So actually, when you have more higher heart rate variability means you have better vagal tone. And if you have lower heart rate variability, meaning your heart rate doesn't have enough variability, that means that you have lower vagal tone, which means your vagus nerve is not as healthy. It's getting stuck, likely in the sympathetic state. So if this is interesting to you, you might want to look more into heart rate variability. And you can use different devices. Sometimes if some of you already have like a certain kinds of watch or a ring that tracks your heart rate variability, or you can order a device that goes on your finger to track your heart rate variability or your earlobe, and that can give you a sense of safe, which is what I'm going to talk about now, as ways you can help your vagus nerve to do a better job to get into a better vagal tone, then you can use these devices to monitor your progress with the activities that you're choosing. First, I want to just talk about some of the ways you might know that your vagus nerve needs help. And some of it is just if you know you've been under a lot of Stress or trauma. Trauma also can stress the vagus nerve. And the way I think about it is it's like the vagus nerve is in shock. And patients describe this as though it's like the vagus nerve just goes into shock and it. And it's like it's inflexible. It's just stuck that way. And you might experience it as like anxiety or.

Fear and panic. That just feels like you can't turn it off. It can also show up as digestive issues. So I oftentimes if I think, if I hear a patient talking about nausea or gastritis or even heartburn, sometimes even bloating and constipation can be related to the vagus nerve. Because remember, part of the vagus nerve is it's communicating to our digestion to do its job. So. So if the vagus nerve is in a stressed state, then the digestion doesn't get the right signals. So our stomach acid is shifting.

The flow. That's what happens with our digestion, is there should be a flow from top to bottom, a constant kind of consistent movement that creates our bowel movement, but it also just creates the fine motion through the digestion. And so when things are obstructed, you start getting reflux where things are coming back, right? Or bloating or pain when things are getting crampy. It can also.

Be related to like swallowing if you feel like you've got a lump in your throat or you have difficulty swallowing, or if you feel like you have like a knot in your stomach. Sometimes it. I hear it as like changes in appetite sometimes even more likelihood for nausea and vomiting.

That I went through that myself for many years. I would experience nausea and vomiting when I got a migraine. And I, in the midst of the migraine, I would be thinking about, this is my vagus nerve. How do I help my vagus nerve understand that it doesn't need to go into this full effort? I think it's like the vagus nerve is actually, if you think about it, is one of the most primitive nerves in the human body. And so it's going to be in a protective response. It's going to go full out, out. It's going to. If it thinks it needs to get something out of your stomach, it's going to work hard. Think of when you get like a food poisoning, right, or stomach flu, that vagus nerve is going to get that vomiting to happen and get everything out of your digestion. It's gonna go full bore, right? That's your vagus Nerve doing that signaling. And so we always are wishing we weren't vomiting, right? It's no fun. It's definitely can be painful and difficult to get through and difficult to recover. So we you know, tend to like want to avoid it. But actually I like to recognize that if our body needs to vomit, it's an important skill for us to have. It's an important thing, a service that our vagus nerve is providing to get something out of our digestion if it shouldn't be there.

Also, if we're experiencing more nausea and vomiting, it could be a sign that the vagus nerve is overstressed and we need to help it recover.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care, daily tips come to you by email and video, gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonnie.com.

Sometimes also with the vagus nerve, when it's stressed will experience more likelihood of dizziness fainting. I used to have this too. It's called a vasovagal response. Like say if you get your, when you get your blood drawn, if you faint or you feel faint or you're you have postural hypotension, when you change your posture, if your blood pressure drops, that's also partly related to the vagus nerve.

So it could also be related to like wheezing, you know, and shortness of breath, feeling tightness in your chest. Sometimes that's a feeling too. So these are all I want you to have that because if you're noticing any of that then it might be your vagus nerve needs help. But really ultimately I think most all of us could use a little more love on our vagus nerve, more nurturing, more support for the vagus nerve to be able to reset and recover from stress and do its parasympathetic job activities.

As I think about it, it's like the vagus nerve is there involuntarily, meaning we don't have to think about it, helping us to breathe and make our digestion and our heart work, but actually.

We can on purpose support our vagus nerve by using our breath. Isn't that amazing? So something as simple as your breath as taking a deep breath. We know when we take a deep breath that immediately signals to the vagus nerve. Just taking a deep breath signals to your vagus nerve to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system. So even though it's an involuntary system, we have ways to signal to it and we just don't, we don't always know that we can use those. So if you now, going forward, now that you know this, if you know that you're feeling stressed, you're feeling anxious, you're feeling tightness, or certainly if you've been experiencing any kind of nausea, stomach pain or stress, then you want to use your breath to say to the vagus nerve on purpose. It sometimes needs the extra signal to calm things. So that's why taking deep breaths can be so helpful for stress. And in the book there's a whole chapter called Recovery. It's R, the R in care, right? C for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. So here is the recovery chapter. And in the recovery chapter I review all the research that on activities that help us recover from stress. And you might guess that a lot of them have to do with stimulating the vagus nerve on purpose. So things like taking deep breaths, even like feeling gratitude or spending time in nature, this also signals to our vagus nerve. Meditation for sure, and mindfulness. These activities have been shown in research to signal to the vagus nerve and calm and support the parasympathetic nervous system. When we're supporting the parasympathetic, that's the anti stress nervous system on purpose, then that's going to help us recover from stress. Also we know that the vagus nerve, because it communicates to the heart, also signals to the production of oxytocin. And oxytocin is an anti stress hormone. When we take a deep breath, we're telling the heart to make oxytocin, which is going to calm our heart rate and send out all kinds of anti stress signals out throughout our body. We can also signal oxytocin with laughter and dancing and singing, which singing and humming also stimulate the vagus nerve. So what you could do if you want to. Here's laughter.

If you want to be giving your vagus nerve some extra calming signals, what you could do is even set aside, like five or ten minutes every day to do some deep breaths, to do some singing and humming or gargling. You can also, if you gargle, you're also stimulating the vagus nerve. So gargle and spit it out if you want to. You can also, if you put cold, cold washcloth or cold water on your forehead, that stimulates the vagus nerve. And so what I would do when I. When I put this together, I started realizing, oh, my gosh, this could help me in the midst of a migraine, when my body's in full pain and stress, signaling. I think my vagus nerve was basically in a spasmodel. I would start. What I would do is hold water in my mouth. This is another trick when you have. When you want to tell your vagus nerve to relax, you just take a sip of water and just, you know, so maybe it's a teaspoon of water, and you hold it in your mouth without swallowing it. Now, you have to be careful. You don't want to lay down because you could choke. So you want to be upright. But you can hold that liquid in your mouth for as long as you can. You can breathe through your nose, of course, and then when you need to, you can spit it out. But holding liquid in your mouth also tells the vagus nerve to calm down. So I would do this to help calm down my vagus nerve, to help decrease the nausea and vomiting that would happen to me when I was in pain. And.

So you can, you know, you don't have to do all of those things, but you could choose some of those activities. Like, lately, I'm really enjoying singing. So if I'm singing multiple times a day, I know I'm signaling to my vagus nerve. But you can also do it with just deep breaths. You know, something as simple as a few deep breaths and again, spending time in nature. I also found that.

When I, as some of you know, I spent quite a lot of time in ceremony with a shaman using plant medicines.

Especially the plant medicine called ayahuasca. And I found that ayahuasca is a huge vagal or vagus nerve reset. It's so soothing to the vagus nerve. And actually, if the vagus nerve is kind of in a. I think of sometimes the vagus nerve is almost like a snake. It's like this long, right? This long nerve. And if it's stressed, it's going to be all like, imagine a snake that's just going all over the place like this. And when the vagus nerve is just stressed and struggling, it's going to be sending all kinds of signals in our body and sending all kinds of stress signals. So when we can calm that vagus nerve and learn how to. I think of it like, basically we're taming the vagus nerve. We have to learn having this human body, if we can learn how to tame our vagus nerve, how to handle it, what can we do on a moment, every five minutes, every hour, multiple times a day, what can we do to send signals to tame our vagus nerve so that it doesn't get into this spasm of stress? How amazing that is. And so if this helps encourage you to just think of it that way, because sometimes we think, oh, just take a deep breath. And we're like, oh, my gosh, it's so annoying to hear that, right? Believe me, when people have told me that when I was feeling stressed, I'd be like, oh, my gosh, it's so annoying. But actually it's true. And if we go, wow, I just need to take a couple deep breaths, give my vagus nerve the right signals, and if I can build that into my day on purpose, what if that isn't just when you're feeling stressed? What if that's when you wake up in the morning? You know, within the first hour, Whatever you're doing in your first hour, if it's a meditation, if it's going for a walk, if it's taking the dog out, if it's whatever you're doing that first hour of the day, make include some breathing or some singing, maybe in the middle of the day, do the same thing at the end of the day. So you just have these constant routines that help support your vagus nerve. I think it's going to make a huge difference for you. I've had patients report back to me that within even two weeks of daily vagus nerve support, they've had complete resolution of stomach pain and bloating and even anxiety and chest tightness. It was going on for years. So it's like, it doesn't have to take that long to shift the pattern once we know what to do. So I hope that's helpful for you. I'm so excited for you to have this information, and I'm so excited for you to have this book. I can't even tell you every night or every day when I was working on it, reading research, figuring out how to put it into this format in this sequence for you so that you could just open it up to the section you need.

And start working on taking care of you, taking better care of you. And we don't come with an instruction manual. So I wrote the instruction manual so that you know what to do to help yourself recover from stress. What do we need to do to help our bodies be healthy even though we're exposed to stress?

So thanks for joining me. I look forward to your comments and questions. If you haven't already, definitely subscribe to this podcast. Or if you're on YouTube, subscribe so that you hear. As soon as I send out another episode, I'd love to receive your comments and reviews and also let me know any other topics you'd like me to cover. I can't wait to hear from you. And thanks again for joining me. See you soon.

Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdani.

Com.