4 Things to Know About the Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve is one of your body’s most underrated workhorses. It runs from your brain stem to nearly every part of your head, torso, and abdomen, keeping your body’s automatic systems functioning. If you think of your organs as your body’s hardware, the vagus nerve is like the software that makes the equipment operable.
Learning about your vagus nerve and how to stimulate it can help you recover from stress, recuperate after workouts, and much more!
Here are four things to know about the vagus nerve:
The vagus nerve is known as the “wandering nerve.”
Vagus means wandering in Latin, and this nerve got its name because it travels throughout your whole body and interacts with almost every major bodily system—the eyes, ears, pharynx (voice box), face, heart, stomach, large and small intestines, liver, kidney, spleen, pancreas, and blood vessels in between.
It helps you keep your (inner) balance.
The vagus nerve is the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which works in partnership with the sympathetic nervous system to maintain homeostasis—a state of equilibrium that’s necessary for health and survival. When you enter “fight or flight,” your sympathetic nervous system is engaged. When your body calms down and returns to its normal state, you can thank your parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve. Resting as intensely as you work is important for proper recovery, and the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve helps prevent indigestion!
Your vagus nerve plays a key role in passing messages back and forth between your brain and your gut. When it’s engaged, it helps you produce saliva and digestive acids, regulate your sense of fullness, move food through the digestive system, and control gut inflammation. If you eat while you’re experiencing a stress response, your body doesn’t perform these roles nearly as well.
Stimulating your vagus nerve can be as simple as breathing.
If you find yourself in a stressful situation, or even after your next strenuous workout, try deep breathing exercises to help your vagus nerve bring you back into homeostasis. Here are a few tips:
Focus on breathing out and emptying your lungs.
When you're stressed, don't hold your breath. Doing so will actually increase your tension!
Breathe from your abdomen, engaging your belly and diaphragm.
Working on these breathing techniques during exercise can even have preventive effects. Give it a try during your next workout to help ward off early fatigue!
One breathing exercise to try:
Lay on your back and place a small weight on your abdomen. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, slowly lifting and lowering the weight with your breath. Repeat 15 times.
In future blog posts, we’ll take a deeper look at the specific functions of the vagus nerve and techniques you can use to harness its power in service of your overall health and well-being.