How to Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve and Decompress With a 4:8 Breathing Technique
How to go from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest within minutes, as told by scientists.
So the word on the street is that the vagus nerve controls our sense of well-being and relaxation. Recently, scientists have established that activating the vagus nerve can slow down your heart rate, switch off the inflammatory hormone cortisol and release an orchestra of calming chemicals into your system.
“We know that depressed people have low vagal activity, and this is associated with less intonation and less-active facial expressions,” says Tiffany Field, PhD.
What is the vagus nerve, and how come you’ve never heard about it? The largest cranial nerve of the human body, the vagus nerve is a part of the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS,) which is responsible for rest-and-digest processes. Scientists are only now learning about its influence on the human experience:
- We know that the vagus nerve cools down inflammatory responses
- We know that the vagus nerve helps strengthen our memory
- We know that the vagus nerve controls…
