Mary Kostka explains the vagus nerve, the longest nerve connecting your heart and digestive system, and how activating it shifts your body from stress to rest mode. Try long exhales, humming, ear massages, or cold water to trigger the shift. A book called Activate Your Vagus Nerve has more techniques.
Aloha sensory heroes. Welcome to day three. We are going to talk about the all important vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in our body and actually even goes out to our ears, down our neck. It innervates our organs, our heart, just, you know, our, our, just all of our digestive organs, everything. And for a lot of our kids it needs to get activated. So when it's, when it's a little under responsive, not activated, we tend to be more in the sympathetic nervous system, in the stress mode where the heart is beating fast, we're not digesting well, that sort of thing. So when you activate it, then everything calms down. You get more in the rest digest mode, getting more in the parasympathetic mode. Breathing is slower, the heart rate is slower. And so it's pretty easy to do this. And so I'm going to tell you some different ways that you can activate the vagus nerve and help that whole nervous system just calm down. So one of the easiest ways is through long exhales blowing. So you know, we talk a lot about blowing bubbles. That's one of the reasons that I like it because if you just tell a child to take a deep breath and blow it out when they're upset, they're not going to do it. So blowing bubbles helps just them focus on that. If you can get them to do that, you can do like ear massages and that helps. Humming is another way because it creates a vibration here that activates it. There's just so many, so many different ways. Another way is by cold. And that's why cold plunges are so popular because kicks in that vagus nerve. And so I'm not saying to cold plunge your child, but what you can do is give them a cold pack and you can have them put it on their neck, put it on their chest or cold water bottle and that can help activate it as well. So there's lots of, lots of different ways that you can activate your vagus nerve. I did put a book called activate your vagus nerve in the, in the book references. That has a lot of different ideas in there. And so like I said, those long exhales you can also do pinwheels work pretty well. I like these little, they're like kazoo whistles, harmonica. All these kinds of things are really good as well. Okay, answer the question below and we'll see you in the next video. It.
