Transcriber: Yonghan Zhao Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs Today I’m going to talk to you about a part of your body that I bet many of you have not hear about before. I’ll going to talk to you about how to retrain your nervous system. This is the vagus nerve.
And stay with me here because things are about to get a little bit nerdy. Rather than being one singular nerve, we can look at the vagus nerve as being a series of connections or a system of its own. It’s comparable in size to the spinal cord.
It starts out in the brain stem and runs all the way down to the colon, touching almost every organ on its way. It really is the epicentre of the mind-body connection. And what we know is that when it comes to this kind of vagus, what happens there doesn’t stay there.
So if we have a little look at the different branches, we can see starting out from the brain stem, coming down to the heart is the ventral vagal branch. And this is also being called the vagal brake, because it connects to our heart’s pacemaker. So it acts like a brake in slowing us back down when we feel anxious or stressed.
This part of the vagus nerve is myelinated, so it’s covered in a sheath that makes it conduct its impulses with greater accuracy and precision. We can also see the part of the vagus nerve running from the heart up to the face. It has connections to the muscles of speech and communication that change our voice.
It has connections to the middle ear that change how we listen to the sound of the human voice, and connections to the muscles in our face to do with expression and also gestures. So from an evolutionary point of view, this part of the vagus nerve is more recent. And what it tells us is that humans that collaborated and worked together thrived.
It also makes sense in the people around us being one of the most potent influences on our nervous system. We can see running from the brain stem coming under the diaphragm and branching out there like a vine to touch all of our organs is the dorsal vagal branch. Now, this also slows us down when we feel stressed, but it does it in a different way.
So this part of the vagus nerve isn’t myelinated, or doesn’t have that covering, and so it’s not as accurate. When it tries to slow us down, it’s a little bit like if we were driving in a car going too fast, pulling the handbrake on. So we may freeze, we may shut down, we may find it really hard to take action.
So these different branches make up part of our autonomic nervous system, the part that slows us down. And we also have another part called the sympathetic nervous system. And together, this autonomic nervous system is always acting in service of our survival to keep us safe.
And we can get to know it a little bit better if we understand the window of tolerance. Now, this is a very useful framework coined by the incredible neuroscientist DrDaniel Siegel. So when we’re inside our window, the ventral vagal branch, or the vagal brake, is working.
And so we will feel a sense of being calm and connected. Our nervous system is flexible, we’re adaptable, our thoughts are coherent and our energy is stable. When we start to face stresses, the first thing that will happen is that vagal brake will just come off a little bit, and we’ll feel our energy start to mobilize, which is a good thing.
It helps us face challenges. But if we can’t deal with this inside our window, we begin to move up above it into the sympathetic nervous system state, which is a little bit like our accelerator. It mobilizes our energy, and we may feel anxious, angry, hypervigilant.
We may find it hard to be still or switch off. And we may have thoughts like ’I need to take action now or something bad’s going to happen’ or ‘It’s not safe to be still’. If we can’t handle the stressor in that situation, or it can’t be dealt with, we may then move down below the window of tolerance into our dorsal vagal state.
And this is a state where we have a sense of hypoarousal, so our energy really drops right down. We may feel like a fog comes between us and the environment, but also other people, so we feel disconnected or dissociated from our body. Here’s the thing that we don’t actually realize though: is the way that we move between these different states is not something that we’re choosing.
It takes place outside of our conscious awareness in a lower center of the brain known as the survival brain. And the survival brain doesn’t communicate with us through words, thoughts or narratives. It communicates with us by creating strong sensations and emotions in our body.
And this is why we can’t think or talk our way out of trauma. We need to work with the body. We also know that the autonomic nervous system resides in our body.
We know that's where the vagus nerve is. And we also know that’s where the sympathetic nervous system is. The wellness industry has sold us a lie.
That being calm is the goal. But it’s not. A healthy nervous system is flexible and adaptable, and it can really move between all these states with ease.
And that is the goal. If we can learn to use things like anger in our favor, then that’s healthy. Anger arises from the mobilizing energy of our nervous system.
But if we cut off from it and push it down, then we can drop down too with it. Down into feeling powerless, down into feeling hopeless, and like we can’t take any action. We need to let that mobilizing energy into our system so that we have strength and agency to take the action that we need to.
Peak performance really comes when we can match what’s happening outside of us with the correct activation inside of us. So what’s the solution? How can we learn to have this flexible and adaptable nervous system?
It’s through learning to come into this play zone of our nervous system. In the play zone, we feel energized, engaged and connected. We can feel like we’re in our flow state.
And play is a blend of two states. So we have the sympathetic nervous systems mobilizing energy, which makes us feel excited and energized. But it’s combined with the ventral vagal state inside our window, where we feel calm and connected.
So we really are seeing a blend of these two states to get there. The need for play doesn’t actually end in our childhood. So research has shown that adults who don't play are less curious, less imaginative and experience less spontaneous joy.
So how can you bring more play into your life? It might be something as simple as putting on a disco at home with your kids and moving around. It could be throwing a Frisbee with your dog and running around with them.
It could be something like going to a fun yoga class and moving and connecting and laughing with strangers. Or play could be something more complicated. It could be joining a theatre.
Maybe it’s putting on a performance. Or maybe it's joining a choir. What we know is that play is the most effective when is involved with other people because we harness the social engagement system of our vagus nerve.
So who are the people in your life that feel the most playful? What environments feel like play to you? So maybe it’s going to a comedy show, the theatre, somewhere in nature, or even a park.
The idea is to find what attunes to your unique nervous system. Play allows us to let the activation into our nervous system without automatically responding with fight or flight, and without releasing these stress hormones into our body. Following chronic and traumatic stress, the size of our window of tolerance can get smaller, so we can spend more time stuck in the anxiety of the sympathetic nervous system or stuck down in the shut-down of the dorsal vagal state.
But play can help us come back inside that window of tolerance. This can really be an antidote following trauma. We also know that play fine tunes our vagal brake.
So yes, sometimes we do need to use that vagal brake and slow ourselves back down. But it also goes the other way. So if we're feeling flat, a sense of apathy, we have extreme procrastination and we feel depressed, sometimes we need to let this mobilizing energy come into our system so that we can experience vitality, well-being, passion and purpose.
And this is the beauty of play. What we know is that we move between these different states by what our nervous system learns through what we experience. So we may not be aware that we are learning, but each experience is being stored in the lower centres of our brain in the most incredible memory storage system.
The experiences of your life that are the most emotional are stored and recalled preferentially. And this is what decides how your nervous system automatically functions today. But the beauty of this is this is something we can retrain.
Just like we can retrain our body after an injury, we can retrain our nervous system after experiences that were traumatic. Play allows us to reclaim our innate capacity for resilience and regulation. It allows us to gently stretch our nervous system to come back into the window and also to widen it over time.
So, my invitation to you is to tomorrow write down three things that help you experience more fun, joy, connection, flow and laughter. Thank you.
