The Vagus Nerve & Gut Health Connection – What Every Woman Over 40 Should Know
Most women over 40 do not arrive at the vagus nerve through neuroscience. They arrive through a list of symptoms that no one has been able to put together. The bloating that shows up no matter what they eat. The 3 am wake up that comes with a racing chest. The food that used to be fine and now is not. The mood that swings without warning. The fatigue that sleep does not seem to touch. The constipation that comes back the moment work gets busy.
If you have been collecting symptoms like that, the vagus nerve and gut health connection is almost always sitting under the pile.
I have spent the last decade of my life as a 25 year founder, a marketing agency CEO, and then a woman who had to rebuild her own health after burnout, early onset menopause, and an 80 pound weight gain. The single most useful frame I have found for what was happening inside my body in those years is the vagus nerve. Once I understood what it does, what stops it from doing it well, and how to actually feed it again, my digestion, my sleep, my mood, and my nervous system all started moving in the same direction at the same time.
This article walks through what the vagus nerve actually is, how the vagus nerve and gut health connection works, what dysfunction looks like in a midlife woman, why yoga, fascia, lymphatic work, and retreats are all really doing the same job underneath, and five vagus nerve exercises you can start tonight with video walk throughs.
What the Vagus Nerve Actually Does in Plain English
The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body that is not part of the spinal cord. It runs from the base of the skull, down the side of the neck, behind the collarbone, through the chest, around the heart and lungs, and into the abdomen where it branches into the stomach, liver, pancreas, small intestine, and most of the colon.
It is the main wire of the parasympathetic nervous system. That is the side of your wiring that calms you down, helps you digest, lets your heart rate slow, and tells your body it is safe enough to recover, sleep, ovulate, and heal.
Think of the vagus nerve as the conductor of the rest and digest orchestra. When it is doing its job, your stomach makes acid on time, your gallbladder squeezes bile when you eat fat, your intestines move food through at the right pace, your heart rate variability is healthy, your inflammation is controlled, your immune system stays balanced, and your mood stays steady.
When it is under fed, under stimulated, and over stressed, almost every system it touches starts to drift.
About 80 percent of vagus nerve fibers are afferent, which means they send information from the body up to the brain. Only about 20 percent are efferent, sending signals from the brain down to the organs. That ratio matters. Your gut is telling your brain how it is feeling far more than your brain is telling your gut what to do. That is a huge part of why anxiety, mood, and gut symptoms keep showing up together.
How the Vagus Nerve & Gut Health Connection Actually Works
The vagus nerve is the physical wire of what people call the gut brain axis. Underneath the buzzword is a real two way conversation that runs every minute of every day.
Here is what that conversation looks like when it is working well.
You sit down at a meal. The smell, the sight, and the chewing send a signal up the vagus nerve to the brain. The brain sends a signal back down to the stomach to release acid, to the pancreas to release enzymes, and to the gallbladder to send bile. That part is called the cephalic phase of digestion and it is one of the reasons eating in a hurry is so brutal on the gut.
Food enters the stomach. The vagus nerve tells the muscles of the stomach when to relax, when to contract, and how fast to push food into the small intestine.
In the small intestine and colon, the vagus nerve helps regulate motility, which is the wave of muscle action that moves food through your digestive tract. Too fast and you get loose stools. Too slow and you get constipation, bloating, and the kind of sluggishness that takes the joy out of eating.
While all of this is happening, the gut is sending information back up the vagus nerve. The vagus is constantly reporting on the state of your microbiome, your gut lining, your immune cells in the intestinal wall, and the level of inflammation in your tissues. Your brain uses that information to set your mood, your energy, your appetite, your sleep drive, and your sense of safety.
This is also where the famous serotonin and dopamine numbers come from. The often quoted line that “90 percent of your serotonin is made in your gut” is true in the sense that the gut produces large amounts of serotonin used locally to regulate motility. Most of the brain’s serotonin is made in the brain itself. But the gut and the brain are constantly talking through the vagus nerve about what mood and what behavior the body should be in, which is why a quiet, healthy gut tends to mean a quieter, more stable head.
Your microbiome is also part of that conversation. Trillions of microbes in your large intestine make short chain fatty acids, neurotransmitter precursors, and metabolites that talk to the vagus nerve in real time. A well fed microbiome makes the vagus nerve’s life easier. A starved, low fiber, alcohol heavy diet makes the conversation hostile.
When the vagus nerve is well toned, all of these signals move smoothly. You eat. You digest. Your mood holds. You sleep well. Your stress finds a top and then comes down. When the vagus nerve is poorly toned, almost every link in that chain stutters.
Symptoms of a Vagus Nerve That’s Not Working Right
The vagus nerve does not get headlines like cortisol or estrogen because it does not show up as a single number on a blood test. But the symptoms of a vagus nerve that is not working right are very recognizable once you know what you are looking at.
These are the patterns I see most often in women over 40 with low vagal tone or vagus nerve misalignment.
Gut symptoms. Chronic bloating that is worse in the evening. Constipation, especially under stress. Acid reflux or burping after meals. Feeling full very quickly. Food sensitivities that keep expanding. New bouts of nausea, particularly first thing in the morning. Irregular bowel movements that swing between sluggish and urgent.
Mood and anxiety symptoms. Anxiety that feels physical before it feels mental. A chest that is tight before your thoughts catch up. Mood swings that line up with bad gut days. Low mood that responds more to a long walk and a real meal than to talking about it. Crying more easily than you used to. Feeling emotionally flat in the morning.
Sleep symptoms. Falling asleep fine and then waking at 3 or 4 am with a racing heart or a worry loop. Light sleep. Waking up tired even after seven or eight hours. Vivid stressful dreams.
Energy and resilience symptoms. Tired all the time but wired at night. Caffeine no longer giving you energy the way it used to. A short fuse with the people you love most. A nervous system that goes from zero to one hundred over small things.
Heart and breath symptoms. Heart palpitations, especially when lying down. Shortness of breath that is not asthma. Sighing a lot without noticing. A chest that feels armored or stiff.
Voice and throat symptoms. A frog in the throat. Hoarseness. A sense that things are stuck in the throat. A weak gag reflex when you brush your tongue.
Inflammation symptoms. Joint and muscle aches that come and go. Skin flare ups. Slow recovery from workouts. Frequent low grade illness.
Cognitive symptoms. Brain fog that gets worse after meals. Trouble focusing when stressed. Memory that feels less sharp than it used to.
You do not need every symptom on this list. Most women have a cluster of four or five at any given time. If you read this and recognized your last six months, the vagus nerve and gut health connection is not a curiosity for you. It is the most important conversation in your body right now.
A separate but related question women ask me is what a vagus nerve that is “in misalignment” feels like. Most of the time the word misalignment in this context is a loose word for low vagal tone or chronic sympathetic dominance, meaning the gas pedal is stuck and the brake is not engaging. The symptoms above are the daily life version of that. The good news is that this state is responsive to deliberate practice. The vagus nerve is trainable.
Why Women Over 40 Are Dealing With Vagus Nerve Dysfunction More Than Anyone Is Talking About
There is a reason this conversation lands so hard in the perimenopause and menopause years.
Estrogen and progesterone both interact with the autonomic nervous system. Estrogen has a calming and supportive influence on vagal tone. Progesterone has a soothing effect through GABA pathways. When both start dropping, the brake of the nervous system gets less responsive. Many women describe this as “I am the same person but my reactions are not.” That is not in your head. It is in your wiring.
At the same time, midlife is when the cortisol pattern often goes upside down. Many women in their forties and fifties have higher than ideal cortisol at night and a flatter morning cortisol curve. That makes it harder to fall back asleep at 3 am and harder to feel awake at 7 am, both of which compound the vagus nerve picture.
Add a midlife life. Most women I work with have spent two decades carrying caregiving, work, household management, and emotional labor at a pace that no human nervous system was built to maintain. Chronic stress drives down vagal tone over time. The vagus nerve is like a muscle. If you stop using it, it stops responding.
Then there is the gut itself. The microbiome shifts during the menopause transition. Estrogen helps maintain microbial diversity. As estrogen drops, gut diversity tends to narrow, the gut lining can become more permeable, and inflammation can creep up. All of which sends a louder, more chaotic signal up the vagus nerve to the brain.
So a midlife woman is often dealing with hormonal change, sleep disruption, accumulated stress, microbiome shifts, and depleted vagal tone at the same time. No single fix will get the whole system back online. But once you understand that all of these symptoms are on the same circuit, you can start sending the right signals into the system every single day.
How Yoga, Fascia, Lymphatic Work, and the Vagus Nerve All Work Together
This is one of the most useful realizations a midlife woman can have. Yoga, fascia release, lymphatic drainage, and vagus nerve work are not four separate practices competing for your time. They are different doors into the same room.
The vagus nerve travels through the neck, the front of the throat, the chest, and the abdomen. It runs alongside the carotid sheath, behind the sternocleidomastoid muscle, near the cervical fascia, and through layers of connective tissue that wrap every organ it innervates. When that connective tissue is tight, dehydrated, or chronically braced, the vagus nerve is being asked to do its job inside a compressed environment.
Fascia, the connective tissue web that wraps muscles, organs, and nerves, responds to slow, sustained movement, hydration, and breath. Yoga, especially the slower forms, is one of the best ways to soften fascia. So is the kind of long held mobility and self massage work covered in the article on unlocking tight fascia and lymphatic flow.
The lymphatic system is a slow moving fluid network that drains waste from your tissues. It has no central pump, so it depends on muscle contraction, deep breathing, and movement to keep moving. The diaphragm, when it moves fully on a deep breath, is one of the most powerful lymphatic pumps in the body. The diaphragm is also one of the most direct pieces of vagus nerve real estate. When you breathe deeply with a long exhale, you are stimulating the vagus nerve and pumping lymph at the same time.
This is why a single twenty minute slow yoga session can leave you feeling lighter in the gut, calmer in the head, looser in the neck, and clearer in the throat. You are not doing four things. You are doing one thing in four places at once.
Yoga’s effect on vagal tone is now well documented. Trials show measurable improvements in heart rate variability, lower cortisol, lower self reported anxiety, and improved gut motility after consistent yoga practice. The bigger the focus on breath and slow movement, the bigger the vagal effect.
This is also why a few days at a real women’s yoga retreat moves the needle in ways that one drop in class cannot. You are stacking yoga, breath, slow nature time, real food, real sleep, hydration, and community on top of each other for several days in a row. The vagus nerve responds to repetition. A retreat is repetition compressed into a week.
How Women’s Yoga Retreats Help Heal the Vagus Nerve
When women ask me whether a yoga retreat is “worth it” for someone with gut issues, brain fog, midlife anxiety, or sleep problems, my honest answer is that the right retreat is one of the strongest vagus nerve interventions available outside of a clinic.
Here is what is actually happening underneath the schedule.
The slower pace lowers the daily sympathetic load. The nervous system gets a chance to recognize that it is not under threat for several days in a row.
The yoga itself uses long exhales, slow movement, breath work, and gentle inversions that all stimulate the vagus nerve directly. Inversions and supported postures increase blood return to the heart and activate baroreceptors in the carotid arteries that talk to the vagus nerve.
The food at a well run retreat is built for the gut. Protein, fiber, real plants, fermented foods, less processed sugar, less alcohol, and minimal industrial seed oils. Several days of this is enough to start shifting the microbiome and to lower inflammation that has been driving the vagus nerve crazy.
Sleep gets protected. Retreats that respect midlife women build the schedule around sleep, not against it. Deeper sleep is one of the single most powerful vagus nerve repair tools available to a body.
Time outdoors and in nature drops cortisol, increases parasympathetic activity, and quiets the gut brain inflammation loop. Forest exposure and time near water both have measurable effects on vagal tone.
Social co regulation in a group of women you actually feel safe with does something to the nervous system that solo practice cannot. The vagus nerve has a strong social engagement branch, sometimes called the social vagus, that responds to safe human connection.
The combination is what makes the difference. A retreat is not a stronger yoga class. It is the same vagus nerve being supported from every direction at once for several days. This is why women often say their gut symptoms, their sleep, and their mood all calm down together at a retreat. They are not separate. They were always on the same wire.
THOR’s women’s wellness retreats in the Smoky Mountains, in Sedona, and in the South of France are built around this exact stack. The setting, the schedule, the food, and the structure of the days are all chosen to feed the vagus nerve in the same direction.
5 Daily Vagus Nerve Exercises With Video Walk Throughs
You do not need a retreat to start. The vagus nerve responds to daily, simple, consistent input. Here are five vagus nerve exercises that have research behind them, can be done in ten minutes a day, and are safe for almost everyone. Each one has a video walk through to make it easy to follow.
Exercise 1. Extended Exhale Diaphragmatic Breathing
This is the most direct and most studied vagus nerve practice. The vagus nerve fires more strongly on the exhale. When you make your exhale longer than your inhale, you are sending a clear safety signal to the parasympathetic system.
How to do it. Sit or lie comfortably. Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Inhale through your nose for a count of 4, letting the belly rise. Exhale through your nose or pursed lips for a count of 6 to 8, letting the belly fall. Repeat for 5 to 10 minutes. Aim for 5 to 6 breaths per minute, which is the breathing rate that produces the highest heart rate variability gains in studies.
When to do it. First thing in the morning before coffee. Before meals. In the car before a hard meeting. At bedtime.
Exercise 2. Bhramari or Humming Bee Breath
The vagus nerve has a motor branch that runs through the larynx. Anything that vibrates the back of the throat and the soft palate stimulates that branch. Bhramari is a yoga breath practice where you hum on the exhale, and it has shown measurable vagal effects in research on autonomic function and stress.
How to do it. Sit tall. Close the eyes. Inhale through the nose for a count of 4. On the exhale, with the mouth closed and the jaw relaxed, hum like a bee for as long as the breath lasts. Feel the vibration in the back of the throat, behind the soft palate, and ideally up into the skull. Repeat for 5 to 10 rounds.
When to do it. Mid morning. After a tense call. Before a meal if you are eating in a hurry. Before bed.
Exercise 3. Cold Water Face Immersion
Cold on the face, especially around the eyes, the cheekbones, and the forehead, triggers what physiologists call the mammalian dive reflex. That reflex slows the heart rate and increases parasympathetic activity through the trigeminal and vagus nerves. It is one of the fastest ways to drop a panicked or wired nervous system in under a minute.
How to do it. Fill a bowl with cold tap water. If your sink water is not very cold, add a few ice cubes for the first 30 seconds. Take a slow breath in. Submerge your face from the temples to the chin for 15 to 30 seconds. Come up, breathe, and repeat 2 or 3 times. If full immersion is too much, splash cold water on your face and hold a cold wet cloth against your face for 30 seconds at a time. Skip if you have certain heart conditions and check with your physician.
When to do it. When you are wired but tired. After a hard call. At 3 am when you cannot get back to sleep. Before a stressful meeting.
Exercise 4. Vigorous Gargling
The vagus nerve innervates the muscles at the back of the throat. Vigorous gargling activates those muscles in a way that is hard to replicate with any other movement. It is silly and it works.
How to do it. Take a mouthful of water. Tilt the head slightly back. Gargle vigorously enough that your eyes water a little. Aim for 30 seconds at a time. Pause and breathe. Repeat 2 or 3 rounds. Spit out the water.
When to do it. Once or twice a day. Morning and evening are easy windows. Right before brushing teeth is the easiest place to anchor it as a habit.
Exercise 5. Neck, Trap, and Side Throat Self Release With Slow Head Rotation
The vagus nerve runs through the neck alongside the sternocleidomastoid muscle, the carotid sheath, and the upper trapezius. When that whole area is tight, the vagus nerve is asked to do its job in a compressed space. A short daily self massage on the sides of the neck and the upper traps, paired with slow controlled head rotations, helps unstick the fascia around the nerve and improves how the head signals safety to the brain.
How to do it. Sit tall. Use the pads of your fingers, not your nails. With light pressure, slowly stroke down the side of the neck from behind the ear toward the collarbone, on both sides, for about 30 seconds each side. Then move to the upper traps and use small, slow circles for another minute. Finally, look slowly up and to the right, hold for 5 to 10 deep breaths, then slowly to the left and hold again. Finish by looking up to the ceiling for 5 breaths and down to the floor for 5 breaths.
When to do it. Once a day, ideally before bed. Also great after long screen sessions.
The five together take about 12 to 15 minutes a day. You will not feel a fireworks display in week one. Around week two and three is where most women I work with start noticing better sleep, less reactive moods, calmer gut, and a smaller stress response to things that used to spike them.
If you want to layer in more midlife specific fascia and lymphatic work, the article on how to unlock tight fascia and lymphatic flow with 5 exercises walks through the full body version of this same idea.
How Food, Hydration, and Supplements Support Vagus Nerve and Gut Healing
You cannot exercise your way out of a vagus nerve that is being inflamed and undernourished by your plate. This is the part that is often missing from the gut brain conversation.
The first move is enough protein. Most women over 40 are walking around chronically under fed in protein. That destabilizes blood sugar, increases cortisol, narrows the microbiome, and keeps the vagus nerve in a state of low grade alarm. A target of roughly one gram of protein per pound of your goal body weight per day, spread across meals with 30 to 40 grams per sitting, is the single biggest move most women can make for both gut health and nervous system stability. Run your numbers through the free Macro Calculator at THOR to get a starting point that is built for your body, not for a 25 year old.
Then add fiber and plant variety. A diverse microbiome talks to the vagus nerve in a calmer voice. Aim for 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day from real food. Try to hit 30 different plants a week if you can, including herbs and spices. This is not a perfection target. It is a direction. The 80 Macro Friendly Mediterranean Recipes cookbook is built around this exact principle, with each recipe tagged for macros, fiber, and prep time.
Reduce the obvious gut and vagus nerve aggravators. Alcohol, especially in the evening, is one of the most direct ways to suppress vagal tone and disrupt sleep. Heavily processed seed oils, ultra processed foods, and high sugar drinks all push inflammation higher and microbial diversity lower. You do not need to be perfect. You need to be honest about what is in your weekly intake.
Hydrate properly. The vagus nerve and the fascia it runs through both work better in a hydrated body. Drink water across the day, not all at once. Add a pinch of mineral salt or an electrolyte mix in the morning if your sleep has been broken. If you want a real ritual that is easy to keep, the Retreat Tea Collection on the THOR shop is built to slot into the slower parts of your day as a calming pause, not a clinical fix.
Supplements that have evidence behind them for this picture. Magnesium glycinate in the evening for sleep and nervous system calm. Omega 3 from a clean source for inflammation. A daily probiotic that has been studied in women, not just men. Soluble fiber if you struggle to hit fiber from food alone. A vagus and stress supportive stack like a balanced B complex and adaptogens for women who have spent years in high stress. Vitamin D if your levels are low. Creatine if you are training. The curated Thorne supplements list at THOR is the same one I use with women in coaching for this picture.
Two notes of honesty. No supplement will outwork a chronically depleted nervous system, three glasses of wine a week, and 90 grams of protein a day. And no daily breath work practice will outwork a gut that is being asked to digest food in 30 second intervals between Slack messages.
How to Build a Daily Vagus Nerve Practice That Survives Real Life
The women who get the biggest gains from this work are not the ones who do the most. They are the ones who do a few things consistently and let the body believe them.
Here is a starter rhythm that holds up in a busy life.
Morning, 5 to 8 minutes. Before coffee, before email. Five to ten minutes of extended exhale breathing in bed or sitting on the floor. A glass of water with a pinch of salt. A protein anchored breakfast within an hour of waking.
Mid day, 3 minutes. One or two rounds of humming bee breath before you eat lunch. Eat with your shoulders down and your phone face down. Chew until food is paste.
Late afternoon, 5 minutes. A walk if you can, even ten minutes. If you cannot, two rounds of cold water on the face and a minute of slow head rotations at your desk.
Evening, 10 minutes. Vagus nerve neck and trap self release before bed. Slow exhales for five minutes lying down. Lights low. Phone in another room. Magnesium with water.
Once a week, 30 to 60 minutes. A real slow yoga or restorative session. Outside if you can.
Once or twice a year, several days. A women’s yoga retreat or wellness retreat that lets the whole system reset in the same direction at the same time.
That is the practice. Twelve to fifteen minutes most days, one longer session a week, and one or two real reset windows a year. The vagus nerve responds to consistency in a way that nothing else in your body does.
If you want a structured, accountable version of this that is built around your hormones, your sleep, your strength, and your gut, that is exactly what the Age With Strength 1:1 coaching program is designed to do over 16 weeks.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Vagus Nerve and Gut Health Connection
Can a damaged vagus nerve really cause gut problems?
Yes. A vagus nerve that is under stimulated, inflamed, or working in a chronically stressed body can absolutely produce real gut symptoms. The most common ones are slow motility leading to bloating and constipation, weak digestive secretions leading to poor breakdown of food and food sensitivities, and chronic low grade inflammation in the gut lining. Most people I see do not have a structurally damaged vagus nerve. They have a poorly toned one. That is responsive to daily practice.
How long does it take to improve vagal tone?
Most women notice small changes inside the first two weeks of consistent practice, such as better sleep and a calmer baseline. Meaningful changes in gut symptoms, heart rate variability, and stress reactivity tend to show up in the four to eight week range. Six months of consistent work is where the body really resets the new baseline.
Are vagus nerve exercises safe for everyone?
The five exercises in this article are safe for the vast majority of healthy adults. Cold face immersion should be approached with caution if you have certain heart conditions or are pregnant. Talk to your physician before adding it if you have any cardiac history. Pregnant women should check with their care team before doing any breath holds.
Do vagus nerve stimulator devices work?
Wearable and at home vagus nerve stimulators are an emerging area. The research is most mature for medical grade devices used in conditions like treatment resistant depression and epilepsy under physician supervision. For most women, you can get a very large percentage of the benefit from breath, cold, humming, gargling, slow movement, sleep, food, and community. Save the device money for a real retreat or a coaching program first.
How is the vagus nerve connected to the gut in one sentence?
The vagus nerve is the main two way wire between your gut and your brain, controlling digestion, motility, and inflammation on the way down and reporting your microbiome’s emotional weather to your brain on the way up.
What are the symptoms of a vagus nerve that is not working right?
The most common cluster is bloating, constipation, food sensitivities, anxiety that feels physical, 3 am wake ups, fatigue that sleep does not fix, brain fog after meals, heart palpitations, a tight throat, and a short fuse with the people you love most. Most women have four or five of these at a time, not all of them.
Can yoga really change my gut symptoms?
In multiple studies, consistent yoga practice has been associated with reduced symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, improved heart rate variability, lower self reported anxiety, and lower inflammatory markers. The mechanism includes vagal tone improvement, reduced sympathetic drive, better diaphragmatic breathing, and reduced cortisol load. Yoga is not a magic pill. It is a steady input that the gut responds to.
Do women in perimenopause need different vagus nerve work than younger women?
The exercises themselves are the same. The dose and the surrounding lifestyle matter more. Midlife women need to pair vagus nerve work with adequate protein, real strength training, sleep protection, and microbiome support. Without those, breath work alone is not enough to undo what hormonal change and chronic stress are doing.
Will a yoga retreat actually do more than a daily home practice?
A retreat does not replace a daily practice. It accelerates one. The repetition of several days of yoga, breath, food, sleep, nature, and community in a row creates a state shift that is hard to reach at home in a busy life. Most women come back from a real retreat with a clearer baseline that they then maintain with their daily practice. The retreat plus the practice is more powerful than either one alone.
What about probiotics? Do they really help the vagus nerve?
Certain probiotic strains have been studied for their effects on mood, anxiety, and the gut brain axis. The category is sometimes called psychobiotics. Bifidobacterium longum and certain Lactobacillus strains have early evidence behind them. A good women’s daily probiotic is a reasonable starting point. Probiotics work best when paired with real fiber and plant variety in the diet, not on their own.
Can I improve vagal tone if I have anxiety or panic attacks?
Yes, and this is one of the most useful applications of vagus nerve work. The cold face reflex, slow exhale breathing, and humming are some of the most reliable in the moment tools for downshifting a panic response. If your anxiety is severe or you have a history of trauma, do this work with a clinician at your side, not instead of one.
What is the connection between fascia, lymph, and the vagus nerve?
The vagus nerve runs through layers of fascia in the neck, chest, and abdomen. The diaphragm, which is one of the vagus nerve’s most important neighbors, is also one of the strongest lymphatic pumps in the body. When you do slow yoga, breath work, fascia release, and lymphatic drainage moves, you are physically clearing the space the vagus nerve operates in and pumping fluid through it at the same time. They are not separate practices. They are the same nervous system being supported from different angles.
How do I know if I should see a doctor for these symptoms?
Anything that is severe, sudden, or progressive should be evaluated. Sudden weight loss, blood in the stool, severe abdominal pain, chest pain, fainting, or new neurological symptoms are reasons to see a physician. The vagus nerve work in this article is meant to complement medical care, not replace it.
What is the single most important thing to start with?
If you only do one thing this week, do five minutes of extended exhale breathing each morning before coffee. That one practice sets the tone for everything else and is the most likely to actually stick.
References and Further Reading
- Breit S, Kupferberg A, Rogler G, Hasler G. “Vagus nerve as modulator of the brain gut axis in psychiatric and inflammatory disorders.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2018.
- Carabotti M, Scirocco A, Maselli MA, Severi C. “The gut brain axis. Interactions between enteric microbiota, central and enteric nervous systems.” Annals of Gastroenterology, 2015.
- Cryan JF, O’Riordan KJ, Cowan CSM, et al. “The microbiota gut brain axis.” Physiological Reviews, 2019.
- Mayer EA. “Gut feelings. The emerging biology of gut brain communication.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2011.
- Bonaz B, Sinniger V, Pellissier S. “The vagus nerve in the neuro immune axis. Implications in the pathology of the gastrointestinal tract.” Frontiers in Immunology, 2017.
- Gerritsen RJS, Band GPH. “Breath of life. The respiratory vagal stimulation model of contemplative activity.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018.
- Pascoe MC, Thompson DR, Ski CF. “Yoga, mindfulness based stress reduction and stress related physiological measures. A meta analysis.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2017.
- Tyagi A, Cohen M. “Yoga and heart rate variability. A comprehensive review of the literature.” International Journal of Yoga, 2016.
- Streeter CC, Gerbarg PL, Saper RB, Ciraulo DA, Brown RP. “Effects of yoga on the autonomic nervous system, gamma aminobutyric acid, and allostasis in epilepsy, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder.” Medical Hypotheses, 2012.
- Kuppusamy M, Kamaldeen D, Pitani R, et al. “Effects of Bhramari pranayama on health. A systematic review.” Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 2018.
- Brown RP, Gerbarg PL. “Sudarshan Kriya yogic breathing in the treatment of stress, anxiety, and depression. Part 1. Neurophysiologic model.” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005.
- Foster JA, McVey Neufeld KA. “Gut brain axis. How the microbiome influences anxiety and depression.” Trends in Neurosciences, 2013.
- Bravo JA, Forsythe P, Chew MV, et al. “Ingestion of Lactobacillus strain regulates emotional behavior and central GABA receptor expression in a mouse via the vagus nerve.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011.
- Park BJ, Tsunetsugu Y, Kasetani T, Kagawa T, Miyazaki Y. “The physiological effects of Shinrin yoku. Evidence from field experiments in 24 forests across Japan.” Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 2010.
- Hopper SI, Murray SL, Ferrara LR, Singleton JK. “Effectiveness of diaphragmatic breathing for reducing physiological and psychological stress in adults. A quantitative systematic review.” JBI Database of Systematic Reviews and Implementation Reports, 2019.
- Sjogren P, Hokwerda H, Vermeer K, et al. “Vagal nerve stimulation for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. A review.” Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, 2018.
- Porges SW. “The polyvagal theory. Phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system.” International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2001.
- Vora M, Mitchell B, Saluja S, et al. “Effects of cold water face immersion on autonomic activity. A review.” Frontiers in Physiology, 2021.
