Mary Kostka explains how the vagus nerve controls your nervous system, shifting between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest. Many kids stay stuck in high-stress mode. She shows simple fixes: humming, blowing bubbles, using whistles, or applying cold to the neck to calm down fast.
Aloha. Welcome to day three, sensory heroes. Today we're going to talk about the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is what gets fired up when they're in fight and flight. Tantrum, meltdown, all of those things. It, I'm going to show you a picture of it to help you kind of get an idea of what I'm talking about here. Okay. So you can see that vagus nerve is the longest nerve in our body. And it travels through the neck and it goes down and it's what makes the heart beat fast or slow. It goes through our whole digestive system. It innervates all the organs. And so when you think of fight and flight and rest and digest the sympathetic and par. Sympathetic nervous system, it's going to operate one way or the other way, depending on what's going on. So this is how we're programmed for being able to fight off danger. And, and, and, and when we're safe, then our body can just feel calm and that's when we're going to digest our food. And so a lot of our kids, their vagus nerve is just always firing. It's just always, always going. I mean, some of the kids I work with, you feel their little heart and it's just going so, so fast. So the cool thing is there are a number of things that you can do to switch it from sympathetic to parasympathetic. So from stress to more relaxed. And, and so that is what I'm going to go over. Just some really quick, easy things that you can do that work really, really well. So humming, if you, if you can get them humming, the vibration of humming is one thing you. And it's one thing that I've noticed a lot of kids just do on their own. They make a lot of noises and stuff. And so I realized that they're activating their vagus nerve. You can. One of our favorite, favorite, favorite, and you'll hear me talk about it a lot throughout this whole thing is blowing bubbles. It is just the one way I can get kids to blow because if you just say, take a deep breath, then they get more mad at you. But if I take the bubbles and I start blowing and then that changes the environment and then eventually they get curious and they start blowing. If I can get three slow breaths out of them, that's enough to switch it over to being more relaxed. And a whistle or kazoo, just anything in the mouth that is going to make a sound or vibrate, something like that is going to be really helpful. Pinwheels are another way. I can sometimes get them to blow straws. Blowing, blowing bubbles through a straw. Another way is cold. So you can get a little kids, just a little gel ice pack that's not too cold, but it's cold. And you can just, you know, can just put it on their neck, you can put it on their chest, you can get a cold water bottle. I had a, a speaking engagement in front of hundreds and hundreds of people and I got really nervous. And even though like in my head I wasn't nervous, it's like my body didn't get the message and my heart was just racing and racing and racing and I was just like trying to breathe, trying to do all these things and nothing was working. But I got a cold water bottle and I put it on my neck and, and that did the trick. So that gives you an idea. Just there's, there's ways that you can just get that quick switch where you can, where you can help the vagus nerve realize everything's okay, everything's safe, and it's okay to be calm. All right, Aloha. And remember to answer the question below, do let little bit of piece of homework so that it reinforces your learning.
