As promised, today I’m going to introduce you to your vagus nerve. And I’m going to do this by walking you through a quick exercise.
First, let me just remind you of the anxiety scale found here. In that post I talked about how anxiety builds on itself and described how it feels on a scale of 1-10. If your anxiety level is higher than a 5-6, you may not notice much benefit from doing an exercise like this. At that point, I’d recommend going for a good long run and getting out some of that excess energy. Then come back here and try this out.
First, I want you to take a second and check in with your body. If you’ve never done this before, it’s a good practice to have. Notice what sensations you feel. Notice if there’s any tightness or tension. Now, find your breath. I know that sounds weird, but we tend to walk around in the world breathing all the time and never really being aware of it. When you move attention to your breath, you automatically deepen it a little bit. Now, I’d like for you to deepen it a little more.
Take a second here and close your eyes and really focus on your breathing. Focus on letting your belly rise first, then your chest and shoulders. Focus on releasing the breath as if you’d just blown up a balloon and let go of it. Let it flow out of your body unforced and uncontrolled. Just let it go.
There. Did you notice that feeling? Take a few more of those breaths. Stop here for a second and just breath. I’ll wait.
Deep breath in, and, as you breath out, let you body sink a little deeper into whatever chair or couch you might be sitting on. You might find that you were, in fact, feeling some tension before, but you didn’t notice it until it started to seep out with your breath.
Did you know that most of us breath differently when we are awake than we do when we are asleep? When we’re awake we breath in, pause, breath out. When we’re sleeping, we tend to breath in, breath out, pause. So, when we’re awake, we tend to be holding our breath a little bit all day long. That may have been the sensation you noticed when you breathed out that first time. You stopped holding your breath.
The vagus nerve is located behind your lungs and diaphragm. It’s part of your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight/flight response. It has a number of jobs, but the one we’re looking at today is that, when stimulated, it sends a signal to your brain that tells your body it’s time to calm down. So, when you take good deep breaths like this, your lungs and diaphragm massage the vagus nerve and activate it.
This can be so empowering! If you can begin to practice this deep breathing and start using it in tense or stressful situations, it can help you to regulate your body. It can help keep you more calm so that you can exercise good decision making and respond, rather than react, to your situation.
This is a great tool to keep in mind when you’re asking your boss for a raise, standing up to address a group of people, taking off on a flight, etc.
What about you? When do you think you could use a little extra vagus nerve activation?
