Is Your Vagus Nerve Is Playing Havoc With Your Digestive System?

What is the Vagus Nerve?

The vagus nerve (VN) originates in the brainstem (the base of the brain) that senses, processes, and regulated the majority of the automatic functions of the body. It originates from the brainstem and runs through the entire body and are two paired structures, one on each side of the body, responsible for regulating controls of the heart, lungs, muscles of the throat and airways, liver, stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, spleen, kidneys, small intestine and part of the large intestine. We don’t have to consciously think about these functions to make them happen as these functions are called autonomic and are regulated by your autonomic nervous system.

How our Nervous System Works

Without your giving it any thought, your heart will beat 100,000 times today, your blood will circulate through your body and you will take 24,000 breaths. Your body is constantly breaking down nutrients and working together with our bacteria in our gut, absorbing nutrients required to make energy for all our cells to work. Have you ever wondered how this all happens without a conscious thought? How do all these systems work together? The answer is your autonomic nervous system. It is part of the nervous system that is responsible for the control of bodily functions that are not consciously directed.

Our bodies are designed to live and survive without the need for conscious though. Within the brainstem are many information control centers, each with a specific set of functions that it manages and sends or receives signals from. Some of these systems alert us to internal stressors as well as risks to our survival in the environment. These mechanisms are regulated by a branch of the autonomic nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system, which is known to increase heart rate, increase breath rate, brings blood flow toward muscles in the arms and legs and away from the liver and digestive tract, and dilate the pupils of our eyes. This system allows us to fight against stressors or “take flight” and run away from the stressors that are presenting themselves. This is referred to as the “flight-or-fight” state.

In contrast, there is another branch of the autonomic nervous system that allows us to relax and recover from the tasks of the day. It allows us to stay calm, decrease our heart rate, decrease our breath, allowing us to take deeper and fuller breaths and brings blood back from the limbs towards the internal organs and allows our bodies to recover and remain calm. This is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When active it is referred to as the “rest-and-digest” state.

The majority of controls completed by the parasympathetic nervous system run thorough a specific pair of nerves in the body – the vagus nerve.

Dysfunctional Vagus Nerve

Breathing

Learning to breathe correctly is one of the simplest and best things you can do for your health. Proper breathing techniques are at the root of so many different therapies, practices and trainings. We have been chronically training ourselves to breathe incorrectly and inefficiently for years for the superficial reasons that have been subconsciously ingrained in each of us from early in our lives.

As a baby, we learn to breathe in the automatic and correct way. The next time you are around a healthy infant or toddler, take a moment and watch how they breathe. What you will notice is that when they take a breath in, their diaphragm contracts, and in doing so, they will actually expand their belly in the process. Diaphragmatic breathing is the process of using your diaphragm muscle rather than accessory muscles for breathing.

Test yourself……

Put your left hand on your belly and your right hand on your chest, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Did your belly expand as you took this deep breath or did your shoulders rise to accommodate the expansion of your lungs?

Bacterial Overgrowth

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) is a common cause of digestive distress. It happens with the bacteria that should only be in the large intestine, overgrow and spread into the small intestine, moving in a backward direction. Vagus activation is necessary to push food forward along the intestinal tract in one direction. If bacteria are moving in the opposite direction, this leads us to understand that there is a weak signal being sent though the VN that allows this motion to occur. This can happen at the ileocecal valve itself (the valve that stops food from going back from the large intestine into the small intestine) or throughout the digestive tract. For this reason, recurrent SIBO is a common finding when VN is weak and need to be activated.

Dietary Choices

The single greatest debate regarding our health is what kind of food plan we should follow. Poor dietary choices can lead to ineffective vagus signaling, dysfunctional digestion and nutrient deficiencies that affect each cell in the body. Highly processed foods made of low-quality ingredients are the major culprit in this battle. Foods containing emulsifiers and preservatives to increase their shelf-life have a direct connection with increased levels of inflammation and gut microbiome changes toward dysbiosis.

These choices trigger opportunistic bacteria to grow and produce higher amounts of toxins, most commonly lipopolysaccharide (LPS – a toxin produced and released by one of 2 types of bacteria in the gut), which are known to break down the bonds between the cells of the intestinal tract and enter the bloodstream; also causing inflammation.

Measuring the Vagus Nerve

How well is your digestive tract moving food? Is it moving at an optimal, healthy pace? We need our food to be processed and broken down on a specific timeline for our bodies to receive the important nutrients that can give us some information about how our digestive tract is functioning and if we need to make some changes to our health.

Test – All you will need is one tablespoon of golden or yellow sesame seeds, one cup of water, a watch/clock and a pen and paper.

Our gut lacks the enzymes to digest and break down sesame seeds (like corn), so they are perfect for this test. Put the sesame seeds in the water and drink water without chewing the seeds – mark down this time. Then, wait until the next time you need to go to the bathroom for a bowel movement. Each time you go to the bathroom and have a bowel movement, take a look and see if you notice any sesame seeds – mark down the times and continue checking until you no longer see any seeds.

The optimal time to see the seeds begin appearing is around 12 hours after ingestion and the latest is around 20 ours after. Seeing seeds 16 hours after ingestion indicates optimal digestive sequence and function.

How to Activate the Vagus Nerve

The below practices and exercises are all found to be effective at increasing vagal tone. The VN has four separate components, each of which can be stimulated to allow optimal signaling and activation of the other three components. These components are:

1. Skin sensation from the central section of the ear;

2. Motor innervation of the pharynx and larynx;

3. Parasympathetic innervation of the heart, lungs, and other organs; and

4. Afferent vagus neurons that send signals back to the brain through visceral fibers.

Breathing

The most effective way to positively affect your Vagus Nerve is to learn to breath correctly.

• · Sit up straight without resting on anything

• Exhale completely to remove all air from your lungs

• Put your right hand on your chest and your left hand on your belly, just above your belly button

• Take a deep breath in through your nose for 5-7 seconds, allowing only your belly to rise (only left hand to rise)

• Hold that breath for 2-3 seconds

• Exhale though your mouth for 6-8 seconds, allowing your belly to fall

• Hold your breath, without any air entering your lungs, for 2-3 seconds

• Repeat as many times as you feel comfortable for a set period of time

Cold Exposure

Periodic cold exposure is one of the best and easiest ways to activate and heal a lost vagus nerve. The simplest ways to incorporate this into your life is to add cold exposure to your showers. Take a normal shower and at the end of the shower, turn the temperature down to as cold as possible and let it hit you on the head and the back of your neck for the final minute or two of your shower.

The goal during this time is to work on controlling your breath and taking as many deep belly breaths as possible. If you can train your body to breathe through the cold, your VN will become very strong and your body will have an optimally functioning parasympathetic nervous system.

Gag Reflex

Voluntarily activating the gag reflex will send an immediate signal to the vagus and the other nerves to keep them signaling quick and optimally. The best time to do this is twice per day, while you are brushing your teeth. You can use your toothbrush to tough the soft palate and stimulate this reflex. As we have a set of cranial nerves on either side of our body, stimulating the soft palate on both sides is necessary to receive the full benefit of this exercise.

Gargling

Gargling is the act of holding a sip of water in the back of your throat and swishing it around with vigor. Practicing this twice per day after brushing teeth is a great way to easily harness this tool. For best results, gargling with extra vigor, to the point where your eyes begin to form tears, is optimal. The superior salivary nucleus is also being stimulated, which triggers the glands around your eyes to produce fluid that become tears, so if you are gargling hard enough to make tears, then you are doing this correctly.

Repetitive Motion Is the Key

We are now understanding though research that repetitive motion and muscle training actually have a great effect on the signaling of nerves than on the muscle itself. The nerves control the signaling to the muscle, when we train, we are actually training the nerve to send signals to the muscles more quickly and efficiently that it was previously. The muscle happens to grow because as use of the muscle increases, so does blood flow to the area. Blood contains oxygen and macronutrients like amino acids and it helps to pull out and take away any waste products.

The important thing to take away from all this is that we can train nerves to signal more efficiently and improve their function. If you would like to chat about this and how to restore digestive function, click contact me and send me a message or email me at NicoleNugentWellness@gmail.com.