9/20/2021 The Breath Is a Back Door to Your Vagus Nerve | by Markham Heid | Elemental

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THE NUANCE

The Breath Is a Back Door to Your Vagus Nerve

‘Respiratory discipline’ can activate your most potent anti-stress system

Markham Heid Jun 24 · 4 min read

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9/20/2021 The Breath Is a Back Door to Your Vagus Nerve | by Markham Heid | Elemental

Photo: Lorenzo Fattò Offidani/Unsplash

Y
and rapid.
our body reacts to stress in a number of well-mapped ways. Heart rate and blood
pressure speed up, muscles tense, digestion slows, and breathing becomes clipped

All of this happens because your brain has registered the presence of some sort of threat.
Whether physical or psychological, this threat triggers a trickle (or a gush) of
adrenaline, noradrenaline, and other stress-related hormones. These chemical
messengers shift the activity of your nervous and immune systems in ways that are
meant to help you either flee from danger or weather some kind of ordeal or
confrontation.

None of this tends to be a problem if it happens in moderation. Your body is designed to

experience plenty of stress-related activation, and there’s some evidence that short
bouts of stress may helpfully sharpen your focus, strengthen your memory, and provide
other temporary benefits without doing any lasting damage. (If the stress response were
wholly bad, your body wouldn’t engage it so readily.)

But if stress is too severe or too persistent, much can go wrong.

Chronic stress promotes low-grade, systemic inflammation, and it’s associated with an
increased risk for pretty much all the major disorders of the mind and body — from
anxiety and depression to heart disease. Pick a medical condition, any medical
condition, and research has probably shown that chronic stress contributes to its
development or makes it worse.

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9/20/2021 The Breath Is a Back Door to Your Vagus Nerve | by Markham Heid | Elemental

As researchers have studied the many overlapping risks associated with chronic stress,
they’ve also identified helpful methods of stress relief or mitigation. That work has
repeatedly found that Eastern wellness or contemplative practices, such as meditation,
yoga, and tai chi — as well as stripped-down, Westernized versions of these activities,
such as mindfulness and progressive muscle relaxation — produce potent anti-stress
benefits.

While each of these practices is unique, a single unifying feature ties them all together:
the breath.

Calm and controlled breathing quickly and dramatically

snuffs out stress by stimulating the vagus nerve
For a 2018 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers from Germany and the
Netherlands explored the role of “respiratory discipline” — basically, slow and measured
breathing — in the management of stress.

In that paper, they make a compelling case that calm and controlled breathing quickly
and dramatically snuffs out stress by stimulating the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve, which experts have nicknamed the body’s “great wandering protector,”
is actually a lengthy, branching network of nerves that extends from your brain down
into your body, where it communicates with many of your organs and systems.

Much about the vagus nerve remains a mystery, but its activity is closely linked to states
of rest and relaxation.

While stress and its attendant fight-or-flight response switches on your autonomic
nervous system, the vagus nerve activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which
dampens autonomic activity and all its problematic effects — including inflammation.

“The vagal nerve, as a proponent of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), is the
prime candidate in explaining the effects of contemplative practices on health, mental
health and cognition,” the Frontiers study team wrote.

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9/20/2021 The Breath Is a Back Door to Your Vagus Nerve | by Markham Heid | Elemental

Doctors are clued-in to the power of the vagus nerve. In a medical setting, vagus nerve
stimulation tends to involve gently shocking the nerve via electrodes attached to a
person’s skin or implanted in the neck.

Vagus nerve stimulation is currently used to treat a range of conditions. According to a

2018 review in the Journal of Inflammatory Research, this treatment is FDA approved for
epilepsy and depression, and it’s increasingly employed as a therapy for inflammation-
linked disorders of the brain and body, everything from lung disease and rheumatoid
arthritis to Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

It may seem farfetched that something as simple (and cost-free) as measured breathing
could likewise stimulate the vagus nerve and produce similar medical benefits. But more
and more, evidence supports this theory.

In their Frontiers paper, the European researchers explain that many different breathing
exercises seem to be beneficial. Diaphragmatic (or “belly”) breathing, box breathing,
and other techniques all switch on the vagus nerve and reduce stress. But summing up
the research to date, they say that slow, calm breathing — something on the order of six
complete breaths per minute, with an emphasis on long and full exhalations — seems to
be most effective.

The ability of the breath to make us better is “such an unremarkable fact, so plainly
observable” that we all tend to ignore it, they write. But the more we learn about the
breath and its association with the vagus nerve, the more it seems like an antidote to
many of our most pressing health problems.

Thanks to Kate Green Tripp. 

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