From slow breathing to gentle movement, experts explain how supporting your vagus nerve may help your body recover from stress, improve resilience and restore a sense of calm
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The vagus nerve is weird and wonderful. It’s the longest, and most complex cranial nerve in the body, going from the brainstem to major visceral organs including the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. It acts as a sort of two-way information “motorway” for information.
Physiologically, it is an integral part of the “parasympathetic nervous system”, which is our ‘rest and digest’ mode of being, the relaxed alternative to our ‘fight or flight’ mode. It works to slow our heart rate, control blood pressure, regulate breathing, and help the body to digest food.
What this means is the vagus nerve is important to pay attention to. “It plays an important role in helping our nervous system shift out of stress and into a state of rest, recovery, and connection,” says Meghan Mitchell, Course Instructor for Headspace’s Training Institute.
Why stress regulation is so important
Accumulative stress means accumulative cortisol, which can affect sleep and even lower testosterone. Emotionally, stress also means we can unintentionally feel overwhelmed, upset, and start to act in ways we don’t want to. Whether this is anxiety at work, or not being the person we want to be around loved ones. Due to a combination of these factors stress is also known to affect heart health and blood pressure, according to the British Heart Foundation.
Stress regulation, therefore, is key to living a peaceful and healthy life. Knowing how to work with our vagus nerve can help us “recover from stress more effectively, as well as give us ways to feel more emotionally and physically resilient,” Mitchell says.
Can we reset the vagus nerve?
People feel like the vagus nerve, and management of it, is a key pathway into our ability to manage stress as it connects the mind and the body. In popular culture, subreddits, and more spiritual-leaning wellness circles, you will see people talking about techniques to reset the vagus nerve.
But it’s about support, not reset. “I tend to think less about “resetting” the vagus nerve and more about supporting it. Simple practices can make a meaningful difference, especially when done consistently,” Mitchell says.
How to support the vagus nerve
Breathing techniques are one of the ways that allow us to effectively stimulate the vagus nerve. “The single most effective way to reduce your stress levels is to take conscious, deep, abdominal breaths. By moving your awareness out of your head and into your breath, your heart rate slows, your mind is calmed, and your blood oxygenated.” Says Katie Brindle, a Chinese Medicine practitioner and health expert.
Studies suggest you can also enhance your vagal tone (tone in a similar sense to muscular tone) through breathing exercises, which in turn means that with practice the easier, and quicker, your vagus nerve is to react and start helping the body to calm.
“Daily practices that support the vagus nerve can improve your ability to respond to stress rather than simply react to it.” Mitchell explains, adding that ‘the goal isn’t to be calm all the time, it’s to become more flexible and resilient so your body can recover after life’s inevitable challenges.”
That being said, there are way to signal to our nervous system, and specifically the vagus nerve, that it needs to step in and help us to calm down. This is especially useful when it comes to anxiety flare-ups, or generally feeling overwhelmed (which is fine, but better still is to do what we can to get back into the swing of things).
These include slow breathing exercises, such as this breathing exercise which can be used to help sleepiness. The aim, when it comes specifically to vagus nerve support, is to inhale deeply, but to exhale with a longer exhale than inhale (it is wise to do these sitting down initially). “gentle movement, and even splashing cool water on your face” can help too, Mitchell says.
While the phrase vagus nerve may sound quite out there, really, it is just a part of our body that we can learn to exercise and strengthen. As with all other parts of who we are, these workouts pay dividends for our wellbeing.
