I Now Suspect the Vagus Nerve Is the Central to Well-beingness

Have you ever read something a million times just to one day, for no apparent reason, think "Wait, what is that?" This happened to me the other day for "the vagus nervus."

I kept coming across it in relation to deep breathing and mental calmness: "Animate deeply," Katie Brindle writes in her new volume Yang Sheng: The Art of Chinese Self-Healing, "immediately relaxes the torso because information technology stimulates the vagus nervus, which runs from the neck to the belly and is in accuse of turning off the 'fight or flight' reflex." Besides: "Stimulating the vagus nerve," per a contempo Harvard Health blog post, "activates your relaxation response, reducing your eye charge per unit and blood force per unit area." And: Deep breathing "turns on the vagus nervus enough that it acts as a brake on the stress response," as an integrative medicine researcher told the Cut last twelvemonth.

I liked this idea that we have something like a secret piano fundamental, under our peel, to press internally to calm us down. Or like a musical cord to pluck. At this point I was envisioning the vagus nervus as a single inner cord, stretching from the head to the stomach. In reality, the vagus nerve is a squiggly, shaggy, branching nerve connecting almost of the major organs betwixt the brain and colon, like a system of roots or cables. It is the longest nerve in the torso, and technically it comes equally a pair of two vagus nerves, one for the right side of the body and one for the left. Information technology's called "vagus" considering it wanders, like a vagrant, among the organs. The vagus nerve has been described equally "largely responsible for the mind-body connection," for its part as a mediator betwixt thinking and feeling, and I'm tempted to think of it every bit something like a physical manifestation of the soul. Also: "When people say 'trust your gut,'" as one Psychology Today author put information technology several years ago, "they actually hateful 'trust your vagus nerve.'"

I became increasingly enchanted with this nerve, even as information technology felt similar I understood it less and less. How does this all work? How does activating a nerve calm u.s.a. down? Is this why I get so needlessly upset about things?

"Stimulating the vagus nerve to the heart has a really powerful result on slowing the heart rate," said Lucy Norcliffe-Kaufmann, acquaintance professor of neurology at NYU-Langone. And this, specifically, is what relaxes united states. The vagus nerve is basically listening to the way we exhale, and it sends the brain and the middle whatever message our breath indicates. Animate slowly, for case, reduces the oxygen demands of the heart muscle (the myocardium), and our middle rate drops.

The vagus nerve is essentially the queen of the parasympathetic nervous system — a.m.a. the "rest and digest," or the "chill out" one — then the more nosotros do things that "stimulate" or activate it, similar deep breathing, the more than we banish the effects of the sympathetic nervous system — a.thou.a. the "fight or flying," or the "do something!" stress-releasing adrenaline/cortisol ane.

Put another style, "Your body senses your animate and adapts its heart rate in response," Norcliffe-Kaufmann told me. When nosotros breathe in, she explained, the sensory nodes on our lungs ("lung stretch receptors") send information up through the vagus nerve and into the brain, and when nosotros exhale out, the brain sends data back down through the vagus nerve to slow downward or speed upwards the heart. And then when we exhale slowly, the heart slows, and we relax. Conversely, when we breathe quickly, our centre speeds upwardly, and we feel amped, or anxious.

I was surprised by the idea that information technology's specifically the exhale that triggers the relaxation response, but Norcliffe-Kaufmann confirmed: "Vagal activity is highest, and centre rate lowest, when you're exhaling." She mentioned that the ideal, most calming way to breathe is six times a minute: v seconds in, five seconds out. She also noted that in the written report that determined this charge per unit, researchers found that this style of tedious breathing is too what practitioners naturally lapse into during meditation with mantras, and during the Ave Maria prayer with rosaries. "Each fourth dimension you do either the rosary prayer or a meditation mantra," Norcliffe-Kaufmann said, "it naturally synchronizes your breathing at six times per infinitesimal." ("That's fascinating," I said. "It is!" she said.)

It made me wonder if there are ways of measuring the quality of the vagus nerve, or "vagal tone," as Norcliffe-Kaufmann described it. This is basically how salubrious, strong, and functional the nerve is. One way, she said, is to measure heart charge per unit variability (HRV) — it's a sort of "surrogate" for measuring actual vagal tone (barring open chest surgery). Heart rate variability is the amount that the heart charge per unit fluctuates between a breath in (when it naturally speeds up) and a breath out (when it naturally slows down). That is, centre charge per unit rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale, and the difference betwixt those ii rates essentially measures vagal tone. Athletes are known to have higher vagal tone, for case, whereas people who experience extended periods of bed rest — and astronauts in no-gravity situations — are known to have lower vagal tone. (How speedily your centre rate slows afterwards exercising is also a good marker of vagal tone.) Vagus nerve stimulation has also been proposed as a way to treat addiction (some heavy drinkers, for instance, accept low vagal tone).

Certain devices measure HRV — and I've personally tried a chest strap and a wristband, only I got stumped on what to do with the data — although Norcliffe-Kaufmann is skeptical about their reliability. "Those technologies are coming," she said, "but it's more of import to focus on breathing and feeling at-home and balanced, rather than on a number." Some other practices believed to amend vagal tone (beyond deep, slow breathing) include laughing, singing, humming, yoga, acupuncture, and splashing the face with common cold h2o — or having a full-body common cold rinse. (Stimulation of the vagus nervus, both manually and with electricity, has also been used to control seizures in epilepsy patients, reduce inflammation, and care for clinical depression.)

Writing this story, and after talking with Norcliffe-Kaufmann, I establish myself animate more slowly and feeling calmer. Not necessarily happy, but steady. Slow animate is boring, but it's about sad how effective it is. I'd unremarkably rather spend hundreds of dollars to get a gadget to track myself than do this free and more-effective thing.

"If y'all're in a stressful situation," Norcliffe-Kaufmann said, "and you're like, How do I answer, how practise I respond? — if yous consciously slow down your breathing only for one minute, or fifty-fifty a few seconds, you can put yourself in a calmer country, to be able to better communicate."

I Now Suspect the Vagus Nervus Is the Primal to Well-beingness