The vagus nerve forms a bi-directional “super-highway” between your brain and the majority of your internal organs. Unless your vagus nerve is in good shape and activates readily when it is supposed to, the communication between your brain and the body will be disrupted.
This modern world can lead to overstimulation of the nervous system and you can become desensitized to chronic stress. Over time, this can lead to low vagal tone, which has been linked to a variety of mental and physical health issues, including chronic inflammation, poor gut function, neurodegeneration, autoimmunity and cancer.
And we know this to be true: you cannot FULLY heal leaky gut, microbiome function or brain issues WITHOUT optimizing your vagus function.
Host of the Mind, Body & The Vagus Nerve Connection Summit, Eva Detko, PhD, MSc, BA (Hons), mIAHT, shares the above wisdom about the vagus nerve. I’ll add this: this overstimulation of the nervous system is especially high right now during this coronavirus pandemic.
In my interview, Balancing Neurotransmitters to Optimize Vagus Function, we start with a review paper that reports how the vagus nerve is intricately connected with anxiety and mood (and immunity).
I share from Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders:
- The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate.
- It establishes one of the connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain via afferent fibers.
The review article goes on to state how the vagus nerve is an attractive tool for treating psychiatric and gastrointestinal disorders: “There is preliminary evidence that vagus nerve stimulation is a promising add-on treatment for treatment-refractory depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and inflammatory bowel disease.”
And as we all know when we hear the term treatment-refractory depression, it means we haven’t got to the root cause of it. It just means that medications haven’t worked for it.
So this allows us to extrapolate and say, well, there’s other lifestyle and dietary, and nutritional approaches that we could use. But they’re saying that stimulating the vagus nerve, activating it, can actually help in this area. And with my work in anxiety, whenever I see depression, I feel like I can replace that with anxiety (because of similar underlying causes). The other thing that they say is that there’s this impact on inflammation: “Treatments that target the vagus nerve increase the vagal tone and inhibit cytokine production.”
And we know that when we’ve got inflammation going on in the body, that’s going to contribute to mood disorders: “Stimulation of vagal efferent fibers in the gut influences neurotransmitters (like serotonin and dopamine, and GABA) that play a crucial role in major psychiatric disorders.”
So the conclusion is that vagal tone is correlated with the capacity to regulate stress responses and can be influenced by breathing. Its increase through meditation and yoga is likely to contribute to resilience, and the mitigation of mood and anxiety symptoms. And we know from other research, and we know from just doing it, that using meditation and yoga is going to affect anxiety levels. We’ve seen research showing that yoga and meditation raises GABA levels, which is one of the neurotransmitters that helps us feel calm. But now we’re also seeing from the research that good vagal tone has an impact as well.
So it’s really exciting to see that there’s many different ways that we can use to approach someone who does have anxiety issues.
I also talk about a very interesting study that brings the connections between GABA and the vagus nerve together very nicely. As I’m talking I see Eva nodding in agreement as I cover this. I wanted to share this study to add another mechanism as to how GABA may work, given so many people don’t believe it can because of the blood brain barrier.
This was an animal study done in 2011 and it’s titled: Ingestion of Lactobacillus Strain Regulates Emotional Behavior and Central GABA Receptor Expression in a Mouse via the Vagus Nerve. You may have had other people in the summit talking about this. I can see you nodding there. Let me just bring it back to this discussion because I’ve got something to add about this. But what they found is this – Lactobacillus rhamnosus increased GABA in the hippocampus. It reduced cortisol levels, which was caused by the increased stress, and it reduced anxiety and the depression in the animals.
When they severed the vagus nerve in some of the mice in the study they found that these neurochemical and behavioral effects were not found. So as soon as the vagus nerve was severed, the effects of the Lactobacillus rhamnosus, which was increasing GABA levels, was not reducing the anxiety and it was not reducing those cortisone levels.
The biggest question that I get about GABA is: “How could GABA possibly work if it can’t cross the blood brain barrier?” Maybe this is one way that is having an impact on anxiety. We know that we’ve got a lot of GABA receptors in our peripheral tissue. We’ve got GABA receptors in our muscles, which probably is the reason why we feel it when we’ve got this physical tension, or we’ve got the spasms. We’ve got GABA receptors in our pancreas. We’ve got GABA receptors in our endocrine system.
But maybe this vagus nerve connection and the fact that when it’s severed we’re not getting those effects, maybe this is another way that GABA is having an impact on anxiety.
Making the vagus nerve connection to serotonin, I share some interesting new research on SSRIs and the vagus nerve, and my favorite vagus nerve exercises. One of them – social interaction – has been challenging lately but cold showers are very do-able.
I also share how I use GABA and tryptophan with clients so if you’re new to this you’ll learn more about this in that section.
As you know, my work is primarily using the neurotransmitters precursors (such as the amino acids) and using dietary changes, but we don’t want to forget about other approaches like vagus nerve support.
If we can improve a vagus function, then we’re going to get even better benefits.
I don’t go into the immune connection in my interview because it was recorded before the coronavirus pandemic started but keep this in mind as you tune in: you cannot have a well-functioning immune system without a healthy nervous system, and vice-versa!
Click here to join me on The Mind, Body & The Vagus Nerve Connection Summit
This event will provide you with all the information you need to:
- Understand the vagus nerve’s complexity
- Know the importance of high vagal tone
- Measure your vagal tone
- Recognize symptoms and root causes of vagus nerve dysfunction
- Optimize gut-brain communication
- Address emotional trauma and chronic stress
- Improve your relationships to increase vagal tone
- Strengthen vagus function with physical approaches
And when you register today, you’ll gain INSTANT access to the following free gifts, including my summit interview video and transcript!
- Symptoms and Root Causes of Vagus Nerve Dysfunction Navaz Habib, DC, AFMCP
- Balancing Neurotransmitters to Optimize Vagus Function Trudy Scott, CN
- EFT, Polyvagal Theory and the Mind-Body Connection Craig Weiner, DC
- Vagus Nerve 101 eGuide from Eva Detko, PhD, MSc, BA (Hons), mIAHT
To your continued learning and healing – and good vagus nerve function!