The vagus nerve quietly orchestrates and regulates essential bodily functions, often without your awareness.
As a communication network, the vagus nerve relays information from the body’s organs and tissues to the brain. It connects to key organs like the brain, heart, lungs, digestive system, and pancreas, supporting health and ready to address a range of challenges with both immediate and long-lasting effects.
By understanding its role and learning how to stimulate it effectively, you can access greater calm, healing, and resilience.
The Vagus Nerve at Work
The vagus nerve is the 10th of 12 cranial nerves. These nerves originate from the brain and play a vital role in various bodily functions.
The vagus nerve is constantly at work without your even realizing it. It’s part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which means its primary role is to calm and restore balance to your body. When activated, it helps lower your heart rate, relax your breathing, and even stimulate digestion, putting your body into “rest-and-digest” mode.
It senses what’s happening inside your body and then adjusts functions accordingly by managing inflammation, regulating blood pressure, or supporting mood by releasing key feel-good hormones. While much of the vagus nerve’s work is subconscious, you can train and activate it through techniques like deep breathing, cold exposure, and meditation to reap its benefits and keep your system in balance.
Organ Interactions
As the vagus nerve travels throughout the body, it branches into various organ systems. When the vagus nerve stimulates these organs, the parasympathetic (rest and digest) response is activated, Dr. Priyal Modi, an integrative medicine practitioner, told The Epoch Times.
These organs and organ systems include the brain, heart rate, digestion, blood pressure, and immune system.
Brain
Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) supports the release of brain chemicals, including serotonin and dopamine, which are key for mood regulation and mental health. It relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety and builds stress resilience. It also enhances cognitive function and creative thinking, said Priyal.
This is likely due to the vagus nerve’s connection with brain regions that regulate mood. VNS results in higher levels of 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), the precursor to serotonin, and an increase in serotonin, leading to improved quality of life, including better emotional adjustment and enhanced social functioning.
Heart Rate and Breathing
The vagus nerve keeps both heart rate and breathing steady to ensure all tissues get a steady supply of oxygen.
It has neurons that connect to the heart and is a main messenger that sends sensory information from the lungs to the brain, controls how the airway muscles constrict and relax, and adjusts both the rate and depth of breathing.
If the vagus nerve senses a threat, like airway damage or blockage, it triggers protective reflexes, such as swallowing or coughing, to keep the airways clear.
Digestion
The vagus nerve allows you to swallow food and prevents you from choking.
It also coordinates energy use, digestion, and appetite. It mobilizes food through the digestive tract and breaks it down.
The vagus nerve is connected to the brain regions that influence hunger and satiety. It helps regulate when you feel hungry or full and can even affect your body’s preference for certain flavors or textures based on nutritional needs.
This system also helps detect the body’s need for things like water and salt and can sense danger from food allergens and toxins.
Blood Sugar and Blood Pressure
The vagus nerve regulates the release of insulin and digestive enzymes and controls blood glucose levels and glucose storage.
It also regulates blood pressure and helps relax and contract the muscles involved in urination. According to Priyal, it also works alongside other nerves to ensure the bladder empties properly.
Immunity
VNS helps reduce inflammation to maintain a healthy immune system.
The vagus nerve’s anti-inflammatory signaling reduces systemic inflammation, a factor often linked to chronic illnesses, Jodi Duval, an Australia-based naturopathic physician and founder of Revital Health, told The Epoch Times.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation
There are many approaches to improve the vagus nerve function, said Priyal. VNS is often defined as mechanical stimulation using a vagus nerve stimulator, which emits electrical signals. However, natural ways to stimulate it include meditation, humming, laughter, and deep, slow breathing.
Breathing is distinct because it’s the only part of the autonomic nervous system that operates both automatically and consciously, giving us direct access to influence this system.
People respond to different types of therapies in characteristic ways; treatment must be tailored to the person’s needs and what’s accessible to them. However, VNS is a universal tool that can benefit everyone, Lidalize Grobler, an educational psychologist, explained.
“It’s something I rely on most in my own practice because, in our modern lives, many of us are constantly in a fight-or-flight state. VNS can help regulate this response, making it a valuable tool for nearly everyone,” she said.
Invasive cervical vagus nerve stimulation has been approved to aid in stroke recovery and treat obesity, depression, and epilepsy. However, this form of VNS requires surgery. It is also expensive and can have side effects.
A newer, noninvasive VNS approach called transcutaneous VNS (tVNS) is more affordable and easy to use. This method stimulates the vagus nerve through the skin near the ear, triggering reflexes without surgery.
Monitoring Vagal Health
Vagal tone—or the influence the vagus nerve has on the body—is a reflection of the health of the vagus nerve, said Priyal.
“High vagal tone indicates good vagus nerve health, which allows a person to respond and adapt to physiological and environmental challenges,” she noted.
The most common and accessible way to measure vagal tone is through heart rate variability (HRV), which tracks the variation in time between heartbeats.
This variation naturally fluctuates in response to breathing and other signals from the autonomic nervous system. Generally, higher HRV suggests stronger vagal tone and better parasympathetic function, while lower HRV may indicate reduced vagal activity, often linked to stress, anxiety, or poor health. Priyal added that HRV can be measured with a fitness tracker, smartwatch, or electrocardiogram (ECG).
A Look Ahead
The state of the vagus nerve is linked to various conditions, ranging from mental health disorders to Alzheimer’s disease. Upcoming articles in this series will explore ways to improve vagus nerve function to alleviate these conditions.
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