Vagus Nerve, Not Vegas Nerve.

It is said that you need to remain calm and have a strong nerve when gambling in Las Vegas. Calmness can easily be found if you focus on the strength of your very own vagus, your vagus nerve.

We all know about fight-or-flight, our sympathetic autonomic nervous system (ANS) that springs into action when we are faced with anything that our brain perceives to be a danger to us. Freeze is the third, lesser referred to response.

Freeze is our parasympathetic nervous system response; it opposes the more natural sympathy for our situation of extreme risk of death occurring when we are faced with an unknown danger. Freeze is our evolutionary response that allows us time to think before acting, the roots of this response believed to be a response to keep us alive by 'playing dead' to predators.

Our heart rate and breathing slow down as we try to figure out the correct response, time seems to slow, and a sense of calmness washes over us. On extreme occasions, our freeze will protect us from what we are seeing as fortunately happened to me once in my police career. I have no recollection of 'seeing' the dismembered body of a women as I entered a blood-splattered room.

It's the vagus nerve that is at play with all three of our ANS responses. The vagus nerve is our tenth cranial nerve, we have twelve of them, running from our brain stem through our spine and going to every major organ in our body. If the vagus nerve senses something is wrong in a particular organ it will engage a physiological action to keep us alive.

When we cough, sneeze, splutter, sigh, vomit, faint, and the many other automatic physiological actions we do to stay alive, you can thank the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is described as the body's main regulator so it is a vital nerve.

Want to know what gut instinct is? It is our vagus nerve sending signals from the change in the microbiomes in our gut to our brain that gives us the feeling that 'something's not right'.

We can stimulate our vagus nerve at any time to engage our parasympathetic nervous system and provide a sense of calm. This can simply be done by sighing.

Here's how it works. Sit up straight, take a very deep diaphragmatic breath through your nose, pushing out your stomach as you fully breathe in, then sigh as hard as you can. Now try and think of something, it's nearly impossible to think of anything. Do it again, how do you feel?

This is a simple technique to employ when you are having continued negative thoughts, when you feel that life is getting on top of you, or when you are simply flat out busy. Take a moment to sigh, to reset your mind.

Other ways of stimulating our vagus nerve are; deep breathing, yoga, taking a cold shower or splashing cold water on our face, eating foods high in tryptophan, intermittent fasting, consuming a probiotic, massaging the side of our neck, laughing aloud, gargling water, and even from chewing gum.

Bioelectronics is a new field of medical study showing great results in reducing stress and inflammation as well as relieving other medical conditions by electronically stimulating the vagus nerve.

Remember to sigh whenever you are feeling overwhelmed, despondent, or just feeling down. Just don't sigh when in front of someone you are talking with, life might suddenly get a whole lot worse for you.

Let's talk!

Lance, a former police crisis negotiator and personnel development manager, now provides enhanced communication, safety management, and personal resilience support to businesses across all industries; https://www.warninternational.com/ 

Lance is the author of the bestsellers - Behind The Tape and Dark Side of the Brain - https://www.warninternational.com/products?category=Books has created a series of eLearning courses - https://elearning.warninternational.com/