The Wandering Nerve

A haphazard tour of vagus nerve exercises and visualizations

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson, @asiwillit

A couple months ago I stumbled across a bizarre guided meditation. It was four minutes long and involved looking (with your eyes) as far as possible to the right for one minute, and then looking as far as possible to the left for one minute. The idea behind it, which was described by the guide as I tried to maintain a sharp rightward glare, is that the muscles behind the eyes are attached to the the vagus nerve, the long, branching nerve that is responsible for the so-called “rest and digest” state. Somehow, moving my eyes this way was supposed to activate that nerve and tip me into this peaceful state.

Upon finishing the strange and slightly uncomfortable practice, I had a bodily sense that something had shifted ever so slightly, like gear moving one notch. It was probably that I was feeling nice and full from the oatmeal I had just eaten, I thought; it couldn’t have been due to the weird eye thing. Or was it? I went about my day. But that week I found myself searching “vagus nerve meditation,” and sampling other brief sessions involving breathing deeply and turning my head and touching the middles of my ears and other apparently vagus-nerve-stimulating acts. In this way I started a haphazard tour of vagus nerve exercises and visualizations that has continued until now. This has not been a daily meditation practice; I have no program or a plan or an organized approach, the way that I typically like to do things (for better or for worse). I have never been able to get into meditation that way, despite wanting to. Instead, this was more of an urge, a small hunger. I wanted whatever that eye thing did to me.

The vagus nerve

As it turns out, every new piece of information I learned about the vagus nerve drew me in further. This nerve is one of ten cranial nerves that originate in the brain stem and fan out all over the body to control the function of various body parts and send information back to the brain. Vagus is derived from the latin word for “wandering,” and the nerve is so named because of its extensive, meandering path through the body. The longest nerve in the autonomic nervous system, it goes to the heart, lungs, muscles of the throat, stomach, liver, pancreas, spleen and parts of the colon. This means that the nerve is important in controlling, among other things, heart rate, respiratory rate, speech, digestion, and blood sugar.

I have long thought that my time as CEO of a startup in Silicon Valley caused or contributed to my suite of chronic health issues—chronic diarrhea at times, chronic constipation at times, heart palpitations, rashes, thyroid autoimmunity, anxiety, chronic fatigue and so on and so forth. I have long believed the common wisdom that stress exacerbates and even causes physical health issues. However, as I love to point out in this newsletter, I have the amazing ability to believe one thing and also really believe the opposite thing at the same time. I imagine my mind going: “Yes, stress affects health. But not, like, this stress, today. I mean this stress is just everyday stress. And it seems far fetched to think that the diarrhea is related to this stress, I mean, they are totally different things happening at totally different times.”

But for some reason, learning more about the vagus nerve has started to make more real for me the connection between stress and health. At the most basic level (and my understanding here is still definitely at the most basic level), there is a massive nerve that gets overused when we experience chronic stress, and this can throw off the nerve’s function. That nerve connects to and controls the heart, the digestive system, and a number of organs and systems that control satiety, blood sugar, and energy. So it is not an enormous leap to imagine how dysfunction in this nerve could contribute to the very types of maladies I have experienced.

This is not a groundbreaking realization. This is exactly what all the research shows, this is well-known, I am unequivocally late to the party. But for some reason, learning about this specific nerve right now in my journey has caused the more hypothetical idea of a stress-health relationship to click for me in a way it hasn’t before. It’s so interesting how that happens: we can hear something several thousand times, and then we hear it once more in the right way at the right time and it sounds new.

Exercising the vagus nerve

As you can imagine, there is a whole world of vagus nerve exercises out there just waiting for an eager new vagus nerve enthusiast like this author. And I have been partaking, heartily. I still find myself wanting these exercises, the way I would want a meal when hungry or a hug when sad. Both me and my husband have noticed that, concurrent with my period of sampling from the vagus nerve meditation universe, I became noticeably less easily annoyed or angered by small everyday things. Is it because of the exercises? Who knows. It seems like that would be almost too easy—I’m not even doing this every day; I’m never doing it for more than eleven minutes. But also, it seems possible.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to keep exercising my vagus nerve. I’m going to ride on this strange new urge to search “vagus nerve meditation.” After all, I simply cannot imagine that my vagus nerve is functioning properly after those six years of constant abuse. Perhaps this is a new opening for me.

You know how these things go—excitement can burn quickly and then flame out. I am especially wary of any new transform-your-health ideas, given my history with healing modalities from the conventional and wacky. But I also want to let it be possible that this could be a seed that grows. I’ll keep you posted.

—Rae

Resources and further reading:

Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg

Christine Vallance on Insight Timer has a number of free vagus nerve meditations, including the Vagus Nerve Basic Practice described in this newsletter.