Wherever in the world you are tuning in from, let’s go ahead and get started with everyone taking a really deep breath, full belly inhalation and exhalation. We are talking today about how to stimulate, how to strengthen the vagus nerve, which is such an important thing for us to be aware of and understand, particularly in times of stress and then just overall functioning of how to regulate our own nervous systems. Now I am recording this podcast right now in the world.
We are in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic. So I wanted to offer this information to you as something that you can understand about what’s happening in your own physiology and also give you ways of being able to work with your own vagus nerve and also maybe even offer some suggestions to parents and work with the children on as well. And once we get through this experience, hopefully you’ll revisit this episode and remind yourself over and over and over again the importance of strengthening your vagal tone, which we’ll talk about.
And just really I actually hope this podcast inspires you to want to dive deeper into the nuances and understanding of regulation and what happens in the nervous system. And as always, the application and the ramifications for this in the playroom are never ending. Our ability to regulate in the playroom with the child is crucial as part of the healing and integration process for children when they come to be with us in our sessions.
So let’s talk vagus nerve. So for those of you that maybe have heard about the vagus nerve, but maybe it sounds too sciency or you haven’t taken the time to really deeply understand it, let me go ahead and offer a little bit of education, a little bit of thinking about it for you. So the reason why the vagus nerve is so key is because it’s actually the longest of the twelve cranial nerves in your parasympathetic nervous system.
It’s the 10th cranial nerve to be exact. It’s often referred to as the wanderer because it is the longest nerve in your system. It actually starts up in your brain stem and goes all the way on down into your gut and it wanders.
Some people talk about it as it wanders like a vagabond. So if you can imagine this network from the brain stem all the way down into the gut and there are sensory fibers coming off of it that are extending into pretty much all your major organs throughout your body. Another nuance of understanding.
We can think about it as lanes. So different aspects or different fiber channels in the nerve, so they talk about it as lanes. So four or five of the lanes of the nerve fibers, they go from the body to the brain, so up body to the brain.
And then one of them actually goes in the opposite direction where it takes the signals from the brain to the body. As I mentioned, it’s the longest one. It has a crucial part in our overall health and well being.
And one of the reasons also is that it plays such an interconnected role with all of the organs in our body communicating motor and sensory impulses. It’s just such a core part of the regulatory system that we have within all of us. I mentioned the word vagal tone.
Some of you maybe have heard of vagal tone before. And so if you haven’t vagal tone. So when someone says you’ve got really strong vagal tone, what they’re really saying is that your capacity to regulate through a stress response is high.
Or more accurately, your ability would be the system to relax or to the system to slow down after a heightened stress response is quite good. So what we’re looking for is a strong vagal tone in the language that I would use and you’ve probably heard me use throughout past episodes in the podcast, is your ability to regulate, right? The ability to regulate your system, the ability to stay connected, to be able to work your own dysregulation, to be connected to yourself in the midst of it. That’s also playing a part of what we’re talking about in this particular episode.
So a therapist that is able to notice the activation in their system and then is able to, for example, take a deep breath, or they’re able to self regulate in those moments, would be a therapist that has a strong vagal tone that would be different than we’re in a play therapy session. And we get really activated and we lose ourselves, we get emotionally flooded really easily. We can’t quite stay present in the experience.
It starts to feel like just like too much. So a couple of other things to know about the vagus nerve and then we’re going to talk about different things that you can do to support vagus nerve functioning. But I’ll just say this since again, I mentioned I’m recording this in the middle of the coronavirus.
The vagal tone that you have and the ability for your vagus nerve to be stimulated in such a way where you are creating health and well being in your body is very closely related to your immune system very closely related. So when we are in high levels of a stress response, where we are releasing cortisol, we’re releasing adrenaline over extended periods of time, it actually can interrupt strong vagal nerve functioning. So really key, the vagus nerve also prevents inflammation in the system.
So again, I’ve talked about this as like these fibers, and I mentioned that four of the five lanes go from the body on up into the brain and then one goes up from the brain stem right down into the body. And so you almost can think of these fibers like spies all around your organs just collecting all of this information. And so when one of these spies, if you will, gets a signal that says we’ve got some inflammation in the system, what it does is it right away alerts the brain.
And the response in the brain is that it basically signals anti inflammatory neurotransmitters. That then basically it’s like, hey, there’s inflammation in the body, go ahead and regulate the body’s immune response. So it’s kind of like little spies out there going, we’re not doing well, we need medicine or send in the whatever.
And it gives that information back up to the brain so that the brain can send in what the system needs in those moments. So you can see how that would be quite important to have strengthened if we have low vagal tone and we’re not able to send in the appropriate body immune response, how the body can actually stay inflamed. It also helps you breathe.
So on that note, let’s all take a deep breath. So there is a primary neurotransmitter related to the vagal nerve called I’m probably going to completely butcher this, but it’s called acetylcholine, I believe is how you pronounce it. I’ll spell it.
A-C-E-T-Y-L-C-H-O-L-I-N-E. I’m pretty sure it’s Acetylcholine. And acetylcholine actually this neurotransmitter, it tells your lungs to breathe.
Isn’t that cool? It’s just such a key piece here in that particular neurotransmitter plays other roles as well. So for example, it slows the pulse of your heart rate. So it’s part of what allows the body to just slow down in the midst of a stress response.
One of the proactive things that we can do, which we’ll talk more about, is you can actually stimulate your own vagus nerve. One of the ways has to do with regulated breathing. That’s why I asked us the beginning just to take a really full deep breath as we were just beginning our time together.
And we’ll come back and practice that here at the end when I get into some different exercises. But I’m going to take another deep breath right now. So I’m taking one.
Feel free to join me. As I mentioned, the acetylcholine slows the pulse of the heart rate. So again, strong vagal tone is intimately involved with your heart, slowing the heart rate down.
If your heart rate goes up because there’s a stress response, it also just initiates the body’s relaxation response. So the vagus nerve, it basically tells your body to chill out by again, releasing acetylcholine. So a really important neurotransmitter.
Again, I keep wanting you to picture this pathway of this really long nerve and then all these different fibers and again these almost like little branches or hands like going off into all of these organs. If you can imagine that. It’s just sending so much information there, trying to support optimal functioning throughout your entire body, releasing different enzymes, releasing proteins, releasing neurotransmitters, all which support the body being able to begin to slow down so that it can actually open and engage rather than staying trapped in that stress response.
There is a lot of research that shows that people that have a stronger vagus response that they’re typically more likely to recover quickly after stress, injury and illness. So maybe you’re hearing this, maybe this is like, okay Lisa, we’re getting the message here that yes, there are things that we can be doing right now in the midst of all of our heightened stress responses with the coronavirus. And there are things that we can begin to make as a daily practice, recognizing that the stronger vagus response that we have overall is just crucial for our well being.
And as I mentioned before, it’s a crucial component for self regulation. I’ll give you maybe just another one here and then we’ll start to get into some of the different activities that we can do. So another piece about the vagus nerve is that it’s intimately connected with your gut.
So many of us have like, oh, my gut feelings. So your gut feelings are very much, they’re real and they’re very connected here to the vagus nerve. I heard someone once refer to the gut uses the vagus nerve kind of like a walkie talkie.
I thought that was kind of cool. Like a walkie talkie to tell your brain how you’re feeling through different I heard it described as electrical impulses. So almost like when you walk into a room and you feel like, oh, I don’t know, something’s off or I feel these different things that are going on, these different gut responses and it’s almost like it’s again communicating walkie talkie, saying hey, maybe there’s some information here that’s happening that we need to be paying attention to.
So again, super cool. We don’t talk a lot about it in the mental health world. It is quite new.
Stephen Porges with Polyvagal theory has just been so amazing in bringing this work to the forefront of our field and helping us really understand the importance of this particular aspect of the nervous system. And as we learn more and more about it, again, we just keep learning the importance and how optimal strength of the vagus nerve is actually a really important part of healing trauma, of resiliency, of immune functioning, of self regulation and all of that is necessary when we are integrating traumas and managing stress. All right, let’s get into some different things that we can be doing here.
So one of the things that I want you to kind of think about here is something called the Goldilocks Principle. So basically when we’re talking about regulation of the nervous system, it really relies upon this idea of the Goldilocks principle. And yes, the Goldilocks principle is based on the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
If you remember, there was the porridge that was too hot, and then there was the porridge that was too cold, and then there’s the porridge that’s just right. We can also overlay the language of window of tolerance on top of this as well. So when we get into a heightened sympathetic response and we start to feel anxious, irritable, panicky, which is what a lot of people are experiencing right now, it’s almost like if we’re going to relate it back to the Goldilocks story, it’s too hot, right? It’s too hot, it’s too activated.
Many people are actually emotionally flooding at this point because it’s just the anxiety levels are so high. And then there’s the opposite experience where we go, again, according to the story, it’s too cold. And this is where everything becomes too much and we start to shut down.
We become depressed, we start to have the feelings of hopelessness set in. So it’s like it’s too much. And the too much, we go into shutdown or we’re perceiving the challenge and we’re still revving up to try to fight.
It so high. Sympathetic, I haven’t mentioned the dorsal parasympathetic, but dorsal parasympathetic is the part of the parasympathetic branch that gets engaged when we shut down, when we start to withdraw into a protective experience. To put that in context with what I’m talking about, because I said that the vagus nerve is also part of the parasympathetic branch.
So again, maybe you’re already putting this together, that your parasympathetic branch slows you down, but you will slow down for two reasons. One is you are under stress and you’re perceiving a challenge, in which case your dorsal response will come on, you’ll shut down again, withdraw. And then the other, which we’re talking about here, when you have high vagal tone, it also has to do with in the moment, being able to have a neuroception of safety.
In synergetic play therapy, we talk about being able to activate a sense of mindfulness, recognizing that, yes, you’re feeling it, but you also don’t have to be in it. And all of that can help access the vagal response in the system, which also allows the system to begin to slow down. But this time we’re slowing down to open and connect and engage, not to pull away and withdraw.
So what we’re going for here is the Goldilocks just right, that’s what we’re going for is that when we’re regulating the system, we don’t want to be so far out of our window of tolerance that we are highly sympathetic aroused, going too far that way. And we’re not so overwhelmed that we are getting flooded in a dorsal response and we’re beginning to shut down. The just right is our ability to stay connected to ourselves in any given moment within whatever window of tolerance we have in that moment because our windows of tolerance are flexible and they’re constantly changing.
So here are things you can do and these are things that you can do proactively. These are things that you can do when you start to feel the activation of your stress response. For those of you that have studied synergetic play therapy, we talk about this as 1ft in, 1ft out.
So my ability to experience the Dysregulation and be regulated simultaneously. So in this language, my ability to experience my sympathetic activation and access my vagal response simultaneously, or when I’m in the playroom with the child and I start to feel maybe there’s an experience that I’m perceiving as really challenging and I start to shut down, or I start to withdraw. So in those moments I’m experiencing my dorsal activation, dorsal parasympathetic activation and can I simultaneously activate my vagal response? So can I be regulated and Dysregulated simultaneously? Can I be 1ft in and 1ft out? Can I feel it and be mindfully aware of it, so that I don’t flood in it, I don’t get lost in it? So these are ways that you can stimulate your vagus nerve.
And I’m not saying that you’re able to do these in a session. These are things that you can do for your own practice. I highly recommend that you incorporate some of these so that you can strengthen your vagal tone, which will naturally translate into the playroom, where you’ll be able to have a wider ability to stay connected to yourself in a stress response in the playroom.
So things you can do, some of these, you might even have a little chucklap splash cold water on your face and particularly from your lips up to your scalp. There’s something about the cold that is able to help regulate the system and to slow the system down. Another one that maybe you have heard of or maybe you practice is if you take a shower and it’s a warm shower.
So for like the last 20 seconds of the shower, turn the water on, cool and allow your system to just to take in just very briefly the cold. That that can also activate the vagus nerve. Another one.
So you can actually put ice cubes, like in a plastic baggie and then put them on your face and just briefly hold your breath again. It slows the system down. Gargling so get some water in there if you’re really activated or you’re really starting to shut down.
Gargling singing chanting I know this last week we’ve been playing a lot of music in my house. There’s a lot of singing going on, so we are taking full advantage of that one. Another one is massage.
Now, you may not be able to just go out and just get as many massages as you’d like, but massage is great and what you can do because really looking at the proprioceptive input into the body and this is one of the things that I teach therapists to do. This is something you can do in the playroom because you’re not going to go be like, excuse me, can I go get my bag of ice cubes and put it on my face? In the playroom, however, that might be something fun to try with a child who is highly stressed out or taking the child over. If you have like a sink in the hallway and splashing cold water on their face, that could be helpful.
Or you can do the gargling with the child in the playroom, definitely singing and chanting. But what you can do for yourself is just squeeze your body. So take one hand and just squeeze your shoulder, squeeze your arm, squeeze your other arm, squeeze your legs.
So that actually helps you stay connected to yourself in those intense moments in the playroom, which also stimulate your vagal nerve and then ultimately a response to be able to slow down and connect the regulated breathing. So when you’re practicing the regulated breathing, what you’re really looking for is a count of equal inhalation and exhalation. So it may maybe even just do this with me for just a couple of rounds.
So I’m just going to count to four. So we’re going to inhale, I’m going to count to four and then we’re going to exhale and count to four. And I’m just going to do that a couple of times.
So when you’re ready, take a deep breath. 1234, exhale, 1234, inhale. 1234, exhale, 1234.
Maybe do one on your own. Beautiful. That’s obviously something that you can do in the playroom.
There’s so many different ways of teaching breathing techniques to children that’s definitely one to take advantage of. Exercise, particularly exercise, yoga, tai chi, qigong are known, and there’s a lot of research behind those three types of exercise in particular that activate the vagus nerve. We know that safe relationships and strong sense of connection also strengthens the vagus nerve.
And if you study synergetic play therapy, you’ll know why it’s all about our clients borrowing our nervous system. Or we also, in times of stress, look towards others to borrow their nervous system. So our own ability to self regulate and access our vagal response is huge for creating safety within ourselves and with other people.
And then the last one that I’ll share, I haven’t personally tried this one, but I’ve heard about it and I’m going to try it to get something to drink, like lukewarm water, put it in a cup and then you take your tongue and you submerge your tongue in the liquid. So you just kind of hold your tongue down in the lukewarm water and the pieces. Apparently, you have to sense the water with your tongue, so really feel that sensation on your tongue.
There’s a lot of connection between the vagus nerve and your tongue and your salivary glands. So, again, I haven’t tried that one, but I’m definitely going to try it. Sounds fun.
So, everyone, hopefully you learned a little something. I know this one was a bit more sciency than we typically go, but just feels important to just get some of this information out there right now, at least to get you thinking in a different direction, so that you can take care of yourselves and recognize that right now, one of the best things that you can do for your immune system is to increase your own vagal tone and to regulate yourself. They are very, very connected.
So everyone, deep breaths, stay well, stay safe. And even in this time of uncertainty, always remember that you are the most important toy in the playroom.
