Welcome to Healthy Ish. Thank you for joining us today on this Body and Soul podcast. I hope you are feeling healthy ish. Of course I am Felicity Harley. Is it just me or is everyone talking about the vagus nerve right now? Well, to shed some light on the crucierrole it plays in regulating our physiology and emotions, I'm joined via online studio by physiotherapist and ted X speaker Jessica Maguire Fyi. Her new book is called The Nervous
System Reset. After listening to this one listening to our other sister podcast, Extra Healthy Ish, where Jessica shares how we can get better at regulating our nervous system. You can search for Extra Healthy Ish wherever you get your podcasts. Jessica, thank you for coming on healthy Ish today. How are you.
I'm well, Felicity, Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, and a new book. Congratulations. How does it feel you always good?
Yeah, it's a very exciting, particularly being my first book, so it's all new to me. But yes, very much enjoying the whole process.
Now. When I did see, well something on the cover of your book, the vagus Nerve, I just thought I am saying this on social media. In the media, everyone's talking about it. Why we're so obsessed with the vagus nerve.
Yeah, it's an interesting time with this coming into mainstream. So I think it's really great that this awareness is coming in because we used to just think of our nervous system, particularly this autonomic nervous system, keeping us safe. It was like a really simple two branch system of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, where you know, the sympathetic was like the accelerator and a car took us in a fight or flight, and the parasympathetic was like the break,
we'll rest and digest and slowed us down. But what we now know is that it's not actually a big enough picture, so it's a little bit outdated. And we know that the power sympathetic branch, there's actually two breaks. And this has to do with the two parts of the vegas nerve. So one part of the vegas nerve that runs from our brain to our heart slows us down and regulates us. This is both our physiology and our emotions changing and the other part can take us
down into a shutdown. And so what's interesting is we are bringing this into mainstream. You know, awareness that this is different. I think that's great, particularly from a trauma informed point of view, and that's why it's taken off.
But we are also seeing a lot on how we hack this vegas nerve and quick things we can do for a fix, which you know, it can in some ways be really helpful, but it may also miss the complexities of the vegus nerve and all the different parts of it, because I think it's more like an ecosystem rather than just one nerve we can hack.
That's a really great description because often you will see hack your vegas nerve and do this, and do that, and you can you can calm yourself in three seconds flat. In some ways, you're right, it's good because it's getting the message out there, but in other ways it's it's kind of well, there's a few falsehoods around it. Why is it important for our health talk to us about this?
Yeah, So, you know, it's interesting. When I was at university a long long time ago, we sort of compartmentalized all the systems, you know, we broke up the body and brain. And even as I worked as a physiotherapist and was really identifying myself as somebody that worked on the body, but what I now know was a lot of the things I was doing was also working on
the brain indirectly from working through the body. And so the vegus nerve is this very much real connection between our brain and body, and the way that the vegus nerve is sending messages will determine the state of our nervous system that we move into. So eighty percent of its fibers are running from the body up to the brain, and it's sending information about how we are, if we're safe or not. But also these same messages are really
important for keeping balance between our systems. So for instance, this is a really simple example, but let's say we feel thirsty and that message is sent up to the brain, then we might go and get a drink and we reregulate that system or our hydration. The same for hunger. But this can also be with things that we're not aware of, like blood pressure, pH balance, that sort of thing. But the branches of the vegas nerve that are running from the brain back down to our organs are actually
regulating our health. So there's a really important role with the branches to our heart to do with cardiovascular health. There's branches to our gut that helped to regulate the digestive system, and the vegus nerve plays a really important role in the immune system with inflammation too. So we can't necessarily separate the brain and body. We can't separate our emotions from our physiology. And this is where physical
and emotional health really intersect. And I think this is a really exciting time because we've heard for so long, well, stress is bad, but what we're really seeing is it's not necessarily that stress is bad. You know, if we mobilize energy to face a demand and we recover from it, that's fantastic. We can do that, We can meet challenges.
But it's the way our vagus nerve releases and then re engages to change our physiology to meet what's happening in front of us accurately and from what's happened in our past. We might respond with too much energy or mobilization in our system, which I've talked about in the book as being in the too hot state, or we might find ourselves responding with not enough and a little bit more of a collapse and an apathy, which I wrote as being in the too cold state in the book.
I mean, I just think when you're talking about you actually described it so well. It's so good to look at a visual of it as well, isn't it. I always come back to the visual of the vagus nerve because it just helps you get your head around well, how it affects every as you say, organ and every body part and filters back into the brain. So how do you describe it? Do you describe it controlling it, balancing it, tuning in like how can we get better at toning it? So to speak.
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think when you talked about before, are we hearing a lot about hacking it. We can't really hack it if we want to look at building more regulation in our nervous system, or what we might say is building vaguel tone. So you know, we can say, well, just like a muscle that's healthy and strong has good tone, we say that the vegus nerve has good vaguel tone. And this is particularly the branch that we look at. It runs from the brain stem.
So if you put your hand on the back of your head, run it down to where that bony ridges, and you went in from there, that's your brain stem and then it goes down to the heart this particular branch. So that connection there of the vegus nerve acts like a break. So if you were riding a bicycle down a hill, you keep a little bit of that break, engage with your fingertips so you didn't go too fast, And that is technically what the vegus nerve is always
doing to us. So if that wasn't there, our heart rate at rest would be about ninety beats per minute, but for most adults, because of that, yep, it's like around seventy. So when we want to meet a challenge, if we've got healthy vagel tone, well actually just relax the break a little bit. So imagine we're like riding downhill.
We relax the break a little bit, we go a bit faster, and this might be now while we're talking, because I love talking about this so much, I get so passionate, and I feel the excitement and mobilizing energy. But then afterwards that break would re engage and I would slow my physiog back down. That's what happens when we've got healthy vaguel tone. But what happens if we don't necessarily have healthy vaguel tone because of periods of
chronic and traumatic stress. Instead of just relaxing that break a little bit, it comes off completely and it's like we find ourselves barreling downhill too fast. And this is really what anxiety is. This is where we move into fight or flight. We might have anger, rage, reactivity, and we feel that like energy come up and we respond in a way where we say, I wish I didn't say that, do that. You know, we have that regret
later on. So the good news is we can actually fine tune or build this vaguel tone through what we do. And that's not necessarily through hacks. It's more like we can do daily things that help, but it's actually more what we do in the heat of the moment, and we teach our brain and our nervous system how to respond in a new way because we think like they're passive taking in information, but they're actually reshaping themselves through
everything we experience. So that's where we lean into neuroplasticity, or how the brain and nervous system change.
Jessica, thank you for coming on healthy.
Ish, thank you for liciting.
Well go by Jessica's excellent advice and toning your vagus nerve cannot be done in three easy hacks from TikTok No. It is a continuous journey throughout your life and if you want to read some more expert information on it, grab it Jessica's new book. It is called The Nervous System Reset and it is out now. If you did enjoy this chat, tell us, rate and review this podcast.
You can also subscribe anything else said to body andsoul dot com DOTU for US and socials orb Our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow. Stay healthy ish