The Super Highway Between the Brain & Gut. The Vagus nerve is a neural pathway between your brain and your gut. It is bidirectional which means the signals travel in both directions. There is always talk of how gut health can affect the brain and your mood and perhaps this is the way it is linked. Likewise, it could also explain when we are nervous or anxious that it can affect our guts, like having “butterflies” in our stomachs.
What is the Vagus nerve?
Did you know that the vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body? It's pretty amazing because it plays a crucial role in regulating all sorts of important functions, like your mental and emotional well-being. The vagus nerve is an important part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps you relax and recharge your energy levels.
Activating the Vagus nerve helps induce a relaxation response which helps counteract the body’s stress response. When the vagus nerve is activated, it releases a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which helps to slow down the heart rate, lower blood pressure, and reduce stress and anxiety.
The vagus nerve plays a crucial role in the communication between the gut and the brain, known as the gut-brain axis. It transmits signals and information about the gut's microbial environment to the brain, which can impact mood, cognition, and mental health. Imbalances in the gut microbiota have been associated with conditions like anxiety, depression, and autism spectrum disorders.
Activation of the vagus nerve can also help regulate the body's inflammatory response. Inflammation has been linked to several mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety. By promoting anti-inflammatory responses, the vagus nerve may help protect against the negative impact of excessive inflammation on mental health.
Emerging studies suggest that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) may enhance neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to rewire and adapt. This has implications for treating conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, where the rewiring and rebalancing of neural circuits may be beneficial.
What is Vagus Nerve Stimulation
In the previous paragraphs you may have noticed the term “activating the vagus nerve” which seems strange as surely the nerve is just a message transporter for the various organs in our body. In actual fact there is a surgery you can have that helps with the stimulation of this nerve. The surgery involves implanting a small device that emits small electrical pulses via a wire directly to the Vagus nerve. But if you are expecting a quick fix solution then this is probably not it, as the results can take as long as a year to materialise. The surgery is relatively new and expensive to perform so generally it is performed as a last resort to patients that suffer from resistant depression that is unaffected by other methods. It is, however, good to know that there is a solution.
Non-surgical Vagus Nerve Stimulation
The following lists procedures you can carry out yourself that can help stimulate the vagus nerve. What you will notice is that the ways you can stimulate the nerve are identical to the methods for generally dealing with stress and anxiety. Which begs the question "have these methods directly benefited our minds or has it always been stimulating the vagus nerve and it is that that has helped us through our issues"?
Known ways to stimulate the Vagus nerve
- Cold exposure
- Breathing exercises
- Making continuous sounds like chanting
- Omega-3
- Meditation
- Probiotics
- Exercise
- Socialising
I expect there are other methods but as you can see most of these I think we would agree are helpful to our mental health. So it seems to be a case of what is good for our vagus nerve is good for our minds and what is good for our minds is good for our vagus nerve.
Summary
What do I think of the Vagus nerve? I think the findings are interesting, and it is great for people who have been suffering with long-term depression that there is a potential solution for them. But for the rest of us, I don’t think we need to worry too much about the specifics. The nerve is there to send messages. If the message is negative, it can negatively affect our mental well-being. If it is positive, it can have the opposite effect. But at the end of the day, it is a message that is being sent from the body. Surely, if that message is negative, we need to hear it and make positive changes to our lifestyle to make an impact and change to the signal being sent. It seems the main messages come from the gut, and it is the microbiota balance that determines if the message is good or bad. Then surely, this is a message that we don’t want to mask or hide from, but listen to and take positive actions to improve our gut health. That is why, in the above list, the Omega-3 and Probiotic options stand out to me the most, as they seem to be the only ones that would treat the cause of any negative messages being sent by the Vagus nerve.
