Your Gut Isn’t Broken — It’s Talking to You 🧠💬 | Kiran Krishnan on True Healing

You know, I've worked with people who were clinically diagnosed as being depressed. Telling them to go eat a salad and some whole foods is probably the very last thing on the list. However, whether it's depression or anxiety that people feel, the science behind the vagus nerve.

The communication between the gut and the brain is through the vagus nerve itself. And the vagus nerve is a bidirectional highway. But interestingly enough, given that it's a bidirectional highway, about 80% of the information goes from the gut to the brain, and only about 20% from the brain to the gut. Right? So that starts to underscore, like, where is most of the information coming from in terms of how we respond to the world around us? It's coming from the gut, right? It's the largest sampling site of the body. So it's utilizing the vagus nerve to send those signals to the brain. And the problem with the vagus nerve is we have something called a sympathetic parasympathetic balance, right? It is. What neurological tone is your vagus nerve in? Is it in the sympathetic tone, which is more the fight or flight response or the parasympathetic tone, which is arrest and digest and repair response? And we want to activate the vagus nerve because we want the vagus nerve conducting that information from the gut to the brain, and then the 20% from the brain to the gut. So we have to activate it. And vagal tone is activated and improved by activating the vagus nerve. Right? So things like humming meditation, deep diaphragmatic breathing, and that's the importance of the vagus nerve.

So this is what's fascinating. If we know that the body needs to be in an optimal state for it to function at its best. If we put the lens of nervous system regulation on that first to cultivate the environment for the body to feel a sense of ease and peace first, then the body can come back online. Right? It's less about the treatment.