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Hello. Good to hear you. Good to see you. Okay, cool. So what is VEGAL tone? Who's heard this term? It's getting popular these days. I've even seen recently someone advertising Vegas nerve water. I heard people selling Vegas nerve water, which seems a little bit ridiculous to me because it's just water, you know, vagus nerve cream, there's all kinds of stuff happening with the vagus nerve. But let's talk about what a vagal tone is 'cause it's important to understand, okay?
So the vagal tone, so cardiac vagal tone is processed and it's a new index of stress, novel just means new, and stress, vulnerability, and mammals. So this is the work of Dr. Stephen Porges and what he's realizing. So a model that we described here that we're gonna talk about emphasizes the role the parasympathetic nervous system and particularly the vagus nerve plays in the fighting stress. what this means is we're gonna start to understand how to put a number to your stress, to your distress.
Not just this, 'cause the thing is, if you have alexithymia or if you don't know how you feel, you could self-report your levels of stress that may not actually be accurate. Does that make sense? You may not actually be able to touch with how much stress you're actually in. So vagal tone is something that we wanna focus on to help us understand how to quantify this. And stress from U stress, which is that good stress all the way down to distress, which can cause sympathetic and dorsal responses.
And so the vagus nerve, of course, is sort of the primary piece of the anatomy that we wanna focus on. And the vagus nerve coordinates all kinds of stuff in our body, sucking, swallowing, breathing, but it also regulates heart rate and vocalization in response to stress. So when your heart is pounding, right, up or down, if you're feeling super calm, right, your heart, what's going on in your heart, matters in terms of your state. And also, does your vocal tone change when you're stressed?
What do you think? Right, who here knows someone that has that tone, and when they have that tone, it triggers you. Okay, so you can start to literally people wear their heart on their sleeve literally, because the tone of somebody's voice is a reflection of their cardiac vagal tone. Okay, and so the tone, the facial expressions, when vocalizes is a outward expression of what's happening internally, which I think is so beautiful,
right? So vagal tone, what is vagal to know? It's an index of stress vulnerability and reactivity, with applications in all branches of medicine. Okay, that's huge. Okay, Porgis is basically saying, all right, that when we look at vagal tone, it's an index of stress, stress, the marker of stress, the way to measure stress and how vulnerable you are, how capable your nervous system is, that can be applied to all branches, all branches of medicine.
That's a staggering con, think about that for a second, all branches. It's not just like for once, not just for like, you know, heart attacks or something, all the branches of medicine. I would add to that all the preheaches of coaching therapy, performance, healing, etc. Okay. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a stable mom, or both. If you're working on your trauma, or if you're trying to create a goal to move forward, vagal tone is where we want to focus.
In fact, we partner with the traumatic stress research consortium at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which was started by Dr. Porjos. I talked to the research team a lot. And one of the things that was fascinating I heard from one of their main researchers is I was like, why are you so obsessed with Vagalton? This is probably 2016 or 15 or something. And they basically said we did a meta analysis of meta analysis,
which means that meta analysis is a large study of lots of studies. Okay, in research, a meta analysis of meta analysis is a large study of meta analysis, meaning it's a shit ton of data. Okay, and basically what they said all casual was basically like everything that has to do with our health is somehow correlated to vagal tone and high rate variability. And I was like, okay, let's see, it was important to know, you know, like, wow, okay, that's important. Thanks for
telling me. And since then I've been really focused on vagal tone in my own personal heart rate variability. And we'll talk more about that here in a second. But we just want to understand that this is a way finally for us to be able to
measure stress. Okay, what is the vagus nerve? The vagus nerve of course is a tend cranial nerve and it mediates homeostasis like are we in stress are we in calm okay and it helps us define how we respond to an experienced stress okay so if you're always stressed it's a vagus nerve thing meaning your vagus nerve probably needs a little bit of fitness okay and so what we want to focus on a vagal tone is the measurement
of cardiac vagal tone is basically a way to assess individuals and our stress response and a vulnerability distress. So each of us have a different vagal tone. Each of us have a different heart rate variability. Okay. And we can start to understand on your specific level, what's right for you? There's population norms. So like what is the general population of someone who's your gender, your age, your socioeconomic background, your race, etc. And then there's that personalized data to you.
Okay. And so the vagus nerve, of course, helps us regulate all these things. So blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, digestion, your immune system, respiration, reproduction. So vagal tone is sort of this place holder for how you're doing. How are all your systems doing? It's this one marker that helps us understand the general health of your system. Does that make sense? (upbeat music) (upbeat music)