How Do I Improve My Vagus Nerve Health? | Dr. Eva Detko

Hello everyone, welcome to another Women to Women podcast where we talk about hormones, weight, adrenals, and trauma. Today I'm delighted to speak with someone who's actually, believe it or not, in Poland, and we're going to be talking today about the vagus nerve. So let me tell you a little bit about her. I'm so impressed. Um, Dr. Eva Ibra is a natural health practitioner, author, and if you look at the credentials she has, I couldn't even name them all, and speaker. She studied natural medicine and the human mind for 23 years. Dr. Ibra successfully recovered from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, and oftentimes, quite honestly, those are the people that have the most to offer because they've been there, done that, and can move on, and also reversed Hashimoto's thyroiditis. She now helps others recover their health. Dr. Ibra's extensive knowledge and experience in the field of human physiology, incredibly important, biochemistry, nutritional sciences, and bioenergetics— another thing that I think that we don't talk about enough. She also uses a wide range of mind-transforming modalities, which we'll talk about today, including havening techniques, brain working, recursive therapies, psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, mindfulness, NLP, transactional analysis, and applied neuropsychoneuroimmunology. So thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much, Marcelle, for this lovely introduction. I'm really happy to be here and contribute whatever I can to, uh, to help people along.

Awesome. So let's begin with the vagus nerve and explain why that's so connected with what we're talking about today, um, and why it's so important that people understand the huge implications that that has on our biochemistry and our, our mind in general?

Yes, it's a rather important nerve, isn't it? And in fact, when anatomists first discovered it, they were quite shocked and they couldn't quite believe that it had as many functions as it does have. And people may already know about it, but in case this is new, Vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve, and what's interesting about it is that it connects the brainstem to actually most of our organs in our chest and abdominal cavity. So when you even look at the extensive innervation of this nerve, all the connections, you can right away, you think, hmm, okay, if it affects all of these organs, it connects to all of these organs, then yeah, it's going to have a pretty wide-ranging impact on our health and healing. And also, obviously, vice versa. If it's not working quite well, then there's going to be implications there. And there's going to be all sorts of chronic symptoms that people may be struggling with and not even realizing that poor vagus function is one of the key elements of what they're— experiencing and should be putting emphasis on. So really, when we're talking about the vagus nerve, we want to place it a little bit. So where does it sit within the nervous system? It's part of our autonomic nervous system. And when we're looking at the autonomic nervous system, we've got the sympathetic branch, which is the fight and flight response, and then we've got the vagus nerve. And in fact, we keep saying the vagus nerve, but we actually have 2 vagus nerves. One of them is the, um, so if we're thinking about the sympathetic, the fight or flight, as the gas brakes, uh, we could be talking about, um, the gas pedal rather, then we can be talking about the brakes, uh, when, when we're talking about the ventral vagus. The other side of the vagus nerve, the dorsal vagus complex, is the freeze or shutdown response. And so, so, so really it's quite interesting that parasympathetic nervous system. Some people think it's just rest and digest. I actually like to call it— call the ventral vagus rest, digest, detoxify, and heal because it really is just responsible with so many different things. But certainly all of those processes that we don't consciously think about that just happen, things like heartbeat. Obviously we can do conscious breathing, but normally when we breathe, we don't have to think about to take a breath. Pupil dilation, vasodilation, all of those sort of things. Those are processes in the body that we don't have to consciously think about. The body just cleverly does that. And so when those processes are ramped up, that's the, that's the gas pedal of the autonomic nervous system, which is the fight or flight. And when everything needs to slow down, that's when the ventral vagus nerve kicks in. So that's the rest, digest, detoxify, and heal response. But like I said, we also have another survival state that is the freeze stroke shutdown response, that it's also the parasympathetic nervous system response. So, and as I said, we need to be looking at the different organs that this nerve connects to. And obviously the communication goes the brain-body, body-brain. It's a two-way communication. It's not— it doesn't just go one way, it goes both ways. And so we've got this constant feedback going on. And so, you know, when we're thinking about the innervation to the lungs, the heart, the pancreas, liver, gallbladder, small intestine, two-thirds of the large intestine, thymus, spleen, you know, we're talking about a lot of organs. I probably didn't even name them all now, but we've got all of that influenced, by this one nerve. So it's a pretty big deal. And like I said, when— as we go on, it's, it's going to become obvious why, um, it's so important and why its effects are, um, as wide-ranging as they are.

So let's backtrack a little bit for people that might not even understand the notion of the vagus nerve. So what we're really talking about here is that when we have enormous amounts of either physical or emotional stress our body goes into a response. And what I see also in my practice is so many times when people have a history of trauma, when they have Lyme disease or they have other, you know, co-infections, their body goes into an alert response. Many times people are in fight-flight, and if they're— they don't know how to do the parasympathetic, that the constant response is going on. So can we give people an example of what you're talking about? Because that really you know, helps people understand. Because so many people I see in my practice, Eva, they are taking all the supplements, they're meditating, but they're not able to shift that, and they're constantly in that bagel response. And because of that, they have so many health problems that come up.

Absolutely. And, and it— you, you sort of touched on so many things. I'd love to unpack all of this as we go because there's so many wonderful aspects of what you just brought into this conversation. But I'm going to start with giving people a little bit of the response hierarchy because I think that's really helpful. And this is, if people are familiar with Dr. Stephen Porges and his work, this may sound familiar. But let's just give a real-life example. So, so I like to, um, there's a few kind of examples that I, I kind of sort of, um, recycle, if you like, in interviews. But, but this is You know, it's important to just have a proper practical understanding of it. I think you're right about that. So let's say that we out for a walk in nature and we going and we just feeling really connected, really nice and relaxed. Whenever you feel that feeling of safety and relaxation, that is your ventral vagus nerve being activated. So that, remember that going forward when we talking about, so how do we activate this vagus nerve more? That's what you— the feeling that you're looking for is that kind of, ah, this is really nice, this is— I feel safe, I feel relaxed. That's the sort of feeling you're looking for. So say you're going out for a walk and you're feeling really great and relaxed and connecting with nature. For most people, that's actually really positive. Maybe not for everybody, but for most people, this works quite well. So the ventral vagus is engaged, and then you see a dog coming your way. And just in that moment, if your vagus nerve is functioning well, you will be able to very quickly assess if the animal is a threat to you or if it isn't a threat to you, because one of the roles of the vagus nerve is actually, um, this kind of discernment of what is a threat, what isn't a threat. And let's say that you realize that that dog coming towards you is looking a little bit angry and a little bit hostile, not what you're hoping you're looking for on your nice relaxing walk. So then what will happen if you, if your brain identifies this dog as a threat, your fight and flight will kick in, meaning you're gonna have two options here. You can either try and run away from this animal or you can try and fight it, right? Fight or flight. Now, if either of those responses work, so let's say you outrun the dog, and you kind of get yourself to safety, what should happen, what should happen is that you immediately switch back to your ventral vagus, like, okay, I'm safe now, I'm good, I'm relaxed, it's all good, right? Let's say that neither of those two responses work. So you're not able to outrun the animal and not able to fight it. Let's say it's a big dog and you wouldn't even take it on. Then the next thing that's going to happen is your nervous system will run into this overdrive. And if you actually for any moment consider that you may be devoured by this dog, let's say that's the thing, right? Let's say, obviously I'm not saying that would be a good experience, but let's just say for the sake of this example that your brain goes, uh-oh, there's no escape from this, we can't fight this. You will go into freeze response, and then you're gonna probably, your body will shut down. If it's like continues to be overloaded, it will shut down and you'll be flooded with hormones that will basically make the pain a little bit more bearable, or it basically will anesthetize you against this dog biting you or attacking you or something like that. So that's basically how this hierarchy progresses. But the very important thing that what you said also, Marcelle, when you were, you know, we were talking about clarifying a little bit more about this, is that a lot of people spend a lot of their time in those survival states. Now, what's really important about how this works, and that's really, really important for people to realize, it doesn't have to be a real threat. So whether that threat is real or imagined, it could be just in your mind. It could be your toxic, you know, emotional, some sort of emotional toxicity that you may have going on, unresolved trauma, some sort of negative belief, poor self-worth, or even you could be in a toxic relationship and you're getting triggered a lot by being in this toxic relationship. And it, you know, it— to your brain, it's a threat, and you're constantly activating either fight, flight, or freeze. Because actually, a lot of people in chronic illness states such as fibromyalgia and CFS which are the two things that I struggle with, they will actually spend a lot of their time in that shutdown response. It's almost like, you know, if the body is not even fighting or fleeing anymore, it's kind of past that. And they spend, you know, they're basically in and out of that freeze response a lot of the time. But that's important to realize. This does not have to be a real threat. I think this is so overlooked because people think, oh, Yeah, I can't be that stressed. You know, I'm, you know, I'm not fighting for my life. You know, it's like, well, it doesn't matter because an email comes in, right? And then it's something irritating about the email or somebody may be giving you a hard time. Maybe it's your boss not very happy with what you— how you're performing. That will put you in fight or flight. Basically, what people need to realize, any time you are not feeling fully 100% safe and relaxed, you're going to be in either fight, flight, or freeze, because the nervous system works on a kind of— it's an on and off switch. It's not a kind of dial switch where you just turn it up a little. No, it's either relaxed or it's stressed. That's it. Or it's shut down. So it cannot be in both. It has to be in one or the other, meaning that unless you're 100% safe and relaxed, even those tiny irritations, even those things that you've desensitized to because maybe you've had anxiety most of your life, or maybe, you know, you've had control issues all of your life, or whatever. If you've desensitized to those stresses, which is what a lot of people do, you will be triggering fight or flight or freeze and not even realize that that's what's happening because You know, like I said, this is the important thing. You need to be 100% safe and relaxed to trigger that ventral vagus response.

So kind of taking that a step further, one of the things I talk about a lot with regards to adrenals, which is really what we're talking about here, is that that activation of that hormone cortisol in particular is that it affects every body part. You know, it increases inflammation, it affects our digestion, it causes the thyroid to not function properly, it causes our hormones to go bizarre and crazy. Blood sugar issues, fluid retention. So what we're really talking about here, and what I love what you're saying, Eva, is that so many people think it's just a simple fix, which is, you know, eh, you know, yesterday happened, for God's sakes, don't worry about it. Or just take, you know, ashwagandha and it'll go away. It isn't that simple, but it also isn't that complicated.

It's absolutely important to, right, right here, right now, to let people know that no matter how, what I call emotionally toxic you are, in that your nervous system is so out of balance, you've got all those things going on in your mind. Maybe you have chronic anxieties, maybe you have periods of depression, maybe you have really negative self-talk, maybe you're overly analytical and you kind of like, your mind is going all the time, the monkey mind type situation. That's absolutely chronic stress. And, and so there's just so many of those facets there. But no matter where you are with this, there's absolutely tools to deal with it. There's, there's, um, if you, if you apply the right strategies and you use the right tools, you can absolutely heal that. And you can absolutely heal trauma, no matter how advanced your trauma, how unresolved, how deep it goes and how far it goes. It could be intergenerational, it could be even ancestral. A lot of the times that plays in. It's not just the— obviously attachment trauma is huge. Definitely not just PTSD. That's almost like the smallest element, to be honest, when it comes to trauma work. It's not to say that it's not a big deal and not insignificant, but it's, it's almost that the least of somebody's problem when they have chronic health issues. That's, that's my experience with, with this work. So, so really there is a process to it and there is some sort of strategy that we need to have for dealing with it. I definitely talk a lot about addressing psychoenergetic root causes. So, you know, like in functional medicine, people talking about the physiological root cause and gut and this and that, it's all still important. I'm not saying it isn't, but we need to be talking more about not just managing chronic stress and to get away from just managing chronic stress. We need to get to the bottom of why somebody's nervous system is out of balance. And actually, pretty much 10 times out of 10, if somebody has chronic health symptoms over a prolonged period of time and they're really struggling to heal properly, no matter what they do, 10 times out of 10, I would say we're dealing with an imbalanced nervous system, which a lot of it will actually go to go back to trauma in childhood or even further back. So it's absolutely true. It's not— you're not going to biohack this. So I'm going to say that I am not a great fan of the word biohack when it comes to chronic stress and trauma. You cannot biohack trauma. You cannot even biohack your nervous system balance. You can use very simple vagus nerve exercises, and we talk about this as we go along. Absolutely, yes, they will help strengthen— new vagus nerve, that's what you want. You want it to be more responsive. So you can do all that. There are loads of different ways in which you can do this. However, if you have unresolved trauma, unresolved emotional toxicity, then what's going to happen is even if you do meditation or deep breathing, or maybe you use essential oils or whatever else you're using to stimulate your vagus nerve, If you have a lot of unresolved trauma and unresolved emotional toxicity, your balance between your stress response and your relaxation response is still not going to be adequate to really experience profound healing. So what I'm saying to people is you need to be looking at how much time overall you spent in this stress response or the survival state. States and how much time you spend in the relaxation response, because you're supposed to. We have evolved to be spending 90% of our time in this ventral vagus response. But guess what? Because of the pressures of our modern lives and all the craziness and all the nonsense that honestly, quite honestly, goes on, you know, in the media, in the school system, and everywhere, and everything that people have to deal with, not to mention financial pressures and all of that. Um, that's even before we get to trauma that they had in childhood. I mean, even the everyday pressures, what, what that does, it means that rather than spend 90% of your time in the relaxation response, it's almost like, it's almost the reverse for a lot of people. So they'll spend 90% of their time in those survival states of fight, flight, or freeze. And so if you then go and do some meditation, this is what you were actually referring to earlier, is that some people go about, I do meditation, I manage my stress with meditation. That's excellent. I'm really glad that you are. But you need to then think, well, hang on a minute, but how much is that swaying this balance? Because even if you are doing your breathing exercises or meditation, maybe you do yoga or qigong or something like that, or you walk in nature, okay, so is that what, like 20% of your day in the relaxation response? Maybe that would be good. 30, 40. What's, what's happening for the rest of the time? And I can tell you that for a lot of people, they will run like headless chickens all day long, and then they will have their half an hour of meditation. And if somebody already has a chronic condition, that's just not going to be enough. That's simply not going to be enough, right?

I mean, I can, I can tell you, notoriously in my practice— I've been in practice for 40 years just only dealing with women, and I see the same people coming back and back, and so many people are having chronic issues and they're terrified kind of look a little bit closer to see where's that trauma coming from. And one of the things that I say to people is, if you don't deal with your story, your story will deal with you. And many of our issues are in our tissues, and I love that approach, and it's what I've done in my practice as much as possible. So people, please understand, you don't have to stay in this place. You don't have to do 40,000 years of psychotherapy but we do have to help you uncover what it is that's contributing to that vagus nerve response of fight, flight, or freeze.

And I am so glad that you actually said that. No, you don't, you don't have to spend ages in therapy anymore. You really— I'm so glad that you said that. This is so important. So people are still used to this old model of therapy, you know, back in the '80s you would go to your psychotherapist or whoever, psychoanalyst, like 4 times a week for 10 years and you'd still have the problem. I mean, honestly, I promise you, we don't do that anymore. I mean, I don't know. I can't speak for everybody. Maybe some people still do that. I don't know. But you don't have to. The point is you really, really don't have to. Because even in the last decade, the understanding of neuroscience has moved on so much that we now have a bunch of really great techniques that are very, very targeted. So you can do really great, profound work, which with permanent results, you're going to have like really permanent results. It's not like it's going to like 5 minutes later you get the same problem. No, when you use those tools properly, you will, and address the root causes, you will have those results whereby you may be triggered by something at the moment, like, I don't know, your partner just saying a certain thing in a certain tone of voice and it kind of takes you back and your brain just got wired because in childhood, maybe your father, your mother used to speak to you in that tone of voice or using those exact words. And you get triggered every time because once you're wired for that, yes, you will get triggered every time. And then what you can do with those techniques is absolutely remodel, because essentially that's what we're doing. We're remodeling those neural pathways and bang, you don't have that trigger anymore. It's, it's amazing what we can do these days. So that's what I want people to understand, that it can be. And I'm not minimizing. It's not, you know, if you have a really bad attachment trauma, for instance, maybe there was a lot of abuse, maybe there was a lot of like this safety wasn't a feature of your childhood and you felt really unsafe. Then obviously it's going to take you a little bit of time to build that back in and rewire your nervous system.. But in either case, it just doesn't have to take a long time. And what is also important to know is that when you don't know, it's a lot scarier than when you do. A lot scarier, which is why when I do the emotional mastery part of the work I do with people in my online program, I, it's, it's amazing how Even teaching— and this is like a small section of what I teach— but even teaching somebody just recognizing how emotions arise in their body and what emotions they are so they can identify them and they can identify the triggers for those emotions. That alone, those exercises alone, can take a lot of energy out of the system because then something comes along and you get this fear response and you go, oh yeah, it's a fear response. Yeah, I know where it's coming from. And that means that you're not going to get on this spiral of what am I feeling? I don't know what I'm feeling. I don't want to be feeling it. And then you're going to start attaching narrative in your mind to, you know, stories. And then you're going to wind yourself up even more. You're going to feel it even more at a more intense level. And da da da da da da da. And before you know it, you have a full panic attack. You don't have to do this, right? You don't have to do this. But if you have a lot of self-awareness and you're connected to your body, because that's another important aspect, a lot of people just live in their heads, as I'm sure you know, right? So, so if you're so disconnected from your body that you kind of run away from everything that you're feeling because probably of earlier trauma, then it's going to be a lot scarier for you if you actually feel something. If a feeling comes, you're not going to understand it. You don't know where the heck it's coming from, what it is that you're feeling and why you're feeling it. That's going to be a lot more triggering and essentially a lot more stressful. So you're putting a lot more stress on the nervous system, whereas if you unpack it and you really get to know yourself and you really get to know your responses, which a lot of them you will be absolutely— you'll be able to change them if you want to. But even identifying some of it and getting to know it, that already takes a lot of pressure off. And you just kind of go, yeah, yeah, no, I know what this is. This is just like I'm getting triggered because, you know, that thing happened to me in the past and then, you know, I get triggered every time. And then, of course, you can go further and remove that trigger with some of those methods that, uh, at least some of the methods that I use. So it's, it's, yeah, it's really important to not to make this work sound worse than it is because it's, it's— you've done worse going to— like I always say, you've done worse going to a dentist, honestly, you know, it's when you come out the other side, as Sandy, I had to deal with a lot of trauma to heal from chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, a lot of trauma. And when you get to the other side, you look back and you're thinking, I am so glad that I've done this. I've never, ever in the 23 years that I've been doing this for, never met anybody who'd say, oh, I wish I'd never done this work. No, you always pleased that you've done it. In fact, a lot of people say to me, Why didn't I do this sooner? I wish I'd do this sooner, right? But you are where you are, and you're going to do it when you're going to do it. And I believe in the right time for everything, and the readiness for change is really important. So if you have that readiness to change, the teacher will appear. You know it's the right time, you're going to engage with it, and bang, bang, bang, it's just going to all fall into place. If you're not ready— a lot of people are not ready— Then, of course, you know, if somebody pushes you into it or you push other people into it, you know, there's no point. You know, you need to be willing to transform in this way.

A wonderful example of what exactly what you're talking about, Eva, is that I saw so many women that have been sexually abused in my practice. You know, 1 in 3 women, 1 in 5 men. And they— it would take me an hour to do their exam because it was so traumatized by it. And this is people that had been in therapy for 10, 15 years. And I kept on saying to them, is if you can't find ways to change your physical response, it's not going to change. And that's exactly what happened, is as soon as they do it, they begin to do this kind of work, then their, their body memory response went away. And you're 100% right, I couldn't agree with you more, that if we don't do it in this way, you know, psychotherapy, you know, year after year after year, stays in our head, but the response is in our body. And I love what you're saying because it's so true, and I see it in women's health all the time, from cramps with their periods to PMS to, you know, chronic, chronic Lyme. I mean, all of these things I think are also part of the puzzle.

Yeah, and it's actually very important for people to realize that when we're talking about attachment trauma, when we're talking about poor self-worth and identity issues which are linked to attachment trauma, when we're talking about limiting beliefs, when you're talking about emotional conflicts, when we're talking about all this crap programming that people, a lot of people have that is really self-destructive, when we're talking about all this, we're talking about subconscious mind and what goes on at the subconscious level. Cognitive approaches like talk therapy, you know, your CBT and all of that sort of counseling, if they're not supported by any tools that can actually rewire your neurology, they're not going to be that effective and they may actually end up re-traumatizing somebody. Okay, so I'm not dissing those methods. All I'm saying is that if you're watching this video and you're thinking, well, now I've done talk therapy before, it didn't work. That's why it didn't work, because, you know, those toys for kids when they have to match a shape to a hole, right? It's like taking a triangle and putting it through a circle. It's like, it's not going in. Well, that's, that's basically what you're doing if you're trying to address those subconscious root causes with talk therapy. It's not going to— it's not, it's not the right tool. However, I do have to give it a shout out in that it's actually really useful for building awareness.

Absolutely, yes.

So it's not redundant. All I'm saying is that you're not going to rewire with this alone, and possibly you can cause some re-traumatization. So we definitely don't want that. And unfortunately, a lot of practitioners— I don't know why, don't ask me why— they're still not very aware of that. And I mean psychotherapists, not still not very aware of the fact that they're not going to be very effective. With things like cognitive behavioral therapy because it's cognitive and you acting on your conscious cognitive mind, whereas everything sits under the surface of that. And if you ever had a fear of something or a phobia of something, you will know that if you get an emotional response, that subconscious programming will produce that. So maybe you had some bad experience with a spider or whatever, you get a phobia of spiders. And it doesn't matter how much you try to talk yourself out of having that emotional response, you will still have that emotional response unless you rewire that. That's the issue. Cognitive, you know, you can desensitize and this and that. What's the point? You can just use the right tool for the job and get it done. And actually, with Havening techniques, I can deal with a straightforward phobia in 15 minutes. And that's it. It never comes back. And the straightforward phobia, because obviously if it's connected to all sorts of other things, then, then it may need, you know, more work. But that's how simple it can be and it never returns. Whereas if you try to do a talk therapy on it, you will still get the response. And let's not forget that it's the emotional response that triggers the nervous system. You know, if you have just a thought with no emotional response at all, And it was some of those methods, that's what will happen. You actually remove the emotional component. So it's not that you delete a memory of an experience, it's just that experience does not have any more emotional hold over you. And therefore it does not trigger your nervous system in a negative way. That's the important realization here. So it's not about deleting memory. You can alter memories. Absolutely. You can alter memories. That's really great work and I really love this, you can create more positive outcomes for some of your past memories that are not so positive. You can absolutely rewire your brain to actually remember them differently. But even if you don't do that, forget that, you can remove that emotional component and then you don't have that stress response anymore. All you have is a memory that doesn't really do anything, right? So, so that's— it's an important thing for people to realize is all those different— there are all those different tricks that we can do, and we can be so, so targeted with it, and that, like I said before, it really doesn't have to take a long time.

So let's talk about some of the techniques. I mean, I think a lot of people are sitting on the edge of their table going, okay, so where do I even start? How do I begin? What are some of the tools that I can learn, and how do I do it?

So I'm going to start by saying the first thing you do is you want to, you want to realize, you want to kind of decide for yourself. You want to decide for yourself if you want to just manage some of your emotional responses, which you can do with those tools very, very successfully. However, if you don't deal with the root cause, you will always have to manage because they will come back over and over. But in the moment, you can manage them. You can bring that stress response right down. Or option 2 is to just go all out and go, I want to know where this came from. I'm gonna, I'm gonna rewire this. I'm gonna go get right to the bottom of it and really root it out, and then I'm never ever gonna have this problem again. So either way, if we decide to go for management or for the root cause approach, The first step is always that you need to have some awareness of where you are right now. And so this is why I have my emotional toxicity questionnaire that I always kind of encourage people to look at, because people don't even realize how much pressure there is on the nervous system because of that desensitization that a lot of people have going on that we talked about previously. But when they do this questionnaire, it's always a bit about like a bit jaw-dropping, and it's It's really about awareness. It's not about going, oh my God, I'm really doomed, I scored all this points on this questionnaire. It's not about that. It's about knowing where you are and really accepting where you are. That's really, really important. It's like, okay, I am a little emotionally challenged right now, but it's, it's okay. Make it, let it be okay. Whatever it is right now, let it be okay. Do not attach to it. Do not fret about it, do not, you know, do not do any of those things. But you really do want to know, because what that does, it also points you to the different areas where you need to put emphasis in terms of your psychoenergetic healing. So, so that, that self-awareness is really important. And so, and then when we're looking at, um, maybe managing emotions or even sort of dealing with trauma at its very root cause, The backbone of my method. So I've got this program, as you know, and so I go through all of those different aspects. So we make sure that we build self-awareness. We make sure that we connect the head to the body, which, you know, if you're a floating head, you're going to really— you're going to struggle healing. You can't heal if you don't feel, as we say. And it's very, very true. So we need to connect the head to the body. We need to rebalance the nervous system and make it a little bit more resilient so that when we deal with some of those more intense traumatic things, you already have enough resilience in the system. And then you just— yeah, you can just get through it. And it's all right. It's not going to overwhelm you or whatever, even if there is a little bit of an overwhelm. You already have the tools to deal with it. That's how I like to teach. I like to give people some tools so that then when they're going through the deeper work that they need to do, um, they can have some resilience and some tools already to deal with it. So it's not that big a deal. So Havening Techniques is the backbone of my method. I do combine all sorts of different things. As you said in the introduction, I've accumulated so many different really, really cool tools over the years. I've got some of my own protocols that I've developed, you know, while working with different people, and everybody just brings something different into, into the equation. So you always, you know, learn through working with clients, and it kind of— they always sort of give you ideas on, oh, I can do this with that and this with that. So I have created some of my own, but Havening Techniques is, um, really it's a psychosensory modality. So it means that you actually, um, stimulating the receptors on your skin, and you, by doing that, act directly on your nervous system. You act directly on your brain and the amygdala, and you can actually calm, um, calm the sort of fire right down, if you like. So it's, it's a beautiful modality, and it's very, very simple to learn in its basic form. But we mustn't underestimate— just because it's simple to learn doesn't mean that it's, I don't know about it. No, it's extremely powerful. It's extremely powerful. It's so simple. You can teach a child to manage their— let's say your child has anxiety issues. You can actually teach your child to do it on themselves, and it will really going— it's going to help them a lot. I know a lot of my clients actually teach their children to use it. So it is in that respect very, very simple, but you can build the complexity by incorporating other tools and sort of you know, as I do, like building my own protocols and incorporating different visualizations and different NLP techniques and transactional analysis and this and that and the other. So, so then it becomes, um, it just becomes like beautifully comprehensive and complex. But, um, but yes, I, I do really encourage people to even on the, on the sort of learning it on the basic level, um, they can very much at the very least, manage the emotional responses as they occur. Because if you, if you have, let's say, um, some anxiety come up, let's say, let's say there's some fear and you feel it rising and you feel that, you know, if you let it, um, wind up, you're gonna probably end up in the right state. And then in that moment, you, you can do a number of things. You can slow your breathing right down with really long exhales. This is really simple. This is even before you get to Havening Techniques, but it works. So you're going to inhale sort of deeply and slowly, but the most important thing is that you're going to exhale really slowly, fully, fully. And so, and then if you, even if you take a few slower breaths like this, right into your abdomen, no forcing, just nice, relaxed, and deep. That activates the vagus nerve, and it's, it's one of the best ways of activating the vagus nerve. It's the cheapest and probably most effective and the simplest for somebody to do, even if they don't have any meditation experience. And in fact, what I would say is that, um, this, the slow deep breathing is a very good entry level to meditation because A lot of people with unresolved trauma, when they sort of, you know, sometimes they go, oh, you know, I must manage my stress, or I better do some meditation because everybody tells me that's what I should be doing. What they often find is that they're not able to relax. They have to work at it. It's a process because the unresolved trauma, as you said, sitting in the tissues, very easily, you know, as you start slowing everything down, you can very easily get triggered because, you know, the body will, will just go like, no, I can't be still. You know, particularly people who just like to be distracted all the time, they do that because they don't want to be still. And the moment they sit in stillness, everything comes at them. And it can be very overwhelming for people, in which case what happens If that happens, if you, you know, do meditation because somebody tells you, but you're in that state with, you know, loads of unresolved stuff and you get triggered, you're not actually activating your vagus nerve, you're activating your fight or flight, right? So here you are doing meditation thinking, I'm doing so good for my stress management, but actually you're putting yourself in a survival state rather than in the relaxation state. This is a big deal. A lot of people give themselves a lot of, sort of, you know, like hard time over this, which— because nobody's explained to them that that can happen. And they think, hang on a minute, I should be able to do it. Why am I not able to do it? And then they start beating themselves up and making the whole thing a lot worse. So if you're one of those people who really struggles with sitting still and meditating, which actually a lot of people do, You could try walking, you know, you could try like mindfulness walking. So for instance, so it's like every step you kind of like really mindful of what's happening. So you can use that approach. But like I said, a good entry level to meditation into really connecting the mind and body is the deep, slow breathing. Most people don't breathe correctly. As you know, I'm not sure you've discussed that previously. They don't. So that will do two things. It will help you relearn the, the way to breathe properly, and also you will be building that neurological resilience because you're activating your vagus nerve with it. Perfect. So, so that's just some ideas there.

Perfect. So if people want to learn more about how to get in touch with you, and also how do they get a hold of the summit, the that's going on right now as well.

All right, yes, so there's a brilliant opportunity because we're talking about the vagus nerve here, and we've got a free event coming up. So this is going to be starting on Monday. It's called Mind, Body, and the Vagus Nerve Connection Summit. So very much along the lines of what we're discussing here, that we will be talking about trauma and that— and how that affects the vagus nerve. But we will also be talking about different physical approaches that people you can also incorporate to help them build more neurological balance in the way that we've discussed. So that summit is free online from Monday to Sunday. So there's 44 sessions, there's practical sessions there. So when you're actually listening to me and you're thinking, oh, this Havening techniques are so rather good, I'd rather, you know, I'd like to try it, watch the summit because I'm actually, as it happens, I'm actually doing a practical session on So you'll be able to try it for yourself. And I'm doing it not in trauma sort of situation because obviously you can't try and, you know, deal with trauma when you have people on the other side and don't know what's going on with them. So, but what we're using, um, Havening with— we're using it with positive affirmations. And that's another beautiful way of actually reprogramming your subconscious mind. So I really recommend that. There's also some meditations there. There's practical tools and there's obviously loads and loads of information. On how to bring it all together for yourself when it comes to this nervous system balance and improving your vagal tone.

Awesome. And how to get in touch with you?

The best place to find me is my website. I don't do Facebook or any other social media. And so, so that's, that's just, it's not for me. There's just too much evil going on there at the moment. And so dr-eva.com is the website, and I've got, I've got some freebies. I've got the questionnaire I was talking about, this on there, like people can just download for free if they want to see where they're at at the moment. Um, so yeah, lots of resources. The Vagus Nerve eGuide that everybody, um, really likes, the Vagus Nerve One-on-One, and that you can also just get some information out of on the topics that we've been discussing here today. So yeah, come and visit me.

And we'll put the link below so people can kind of tap on that as well. So thank you so much. Um, it was absolutely my pleasure because you were speaking the same language and I just love it. And we're both European, it's good.

So absolutely, it's absolutely great to connect with yourself and with your audience. I really do hope that I've sparked some interest with this and that people will actually take some action on this and look into this deeper because because I can tell you that if you bring vagus nerve work into your healing, all the diet, all the supplements, everything that you're doing already will work for you so much better. You're going to take it to another level altogether. So, um, I really do hope that people engage with it.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much.