VIva Las Vagus Nerve

Jen talks to Dr. Navaz Habib about the importance of "activating" the Vagus Nerve to bring down anxiety, inflammation, brain fog, and more - and how most adults aren't breathing correctly.

For more information about Dr. Habib's book, "Activate Your Vagus Nerve: Unleash Your Body's Natural Ability To Heal" go here: http://drhabib.ca/ayvn-book-page/

For more information on Jen Kirkman, the host of Anxiety Bites, please go here: https://jenkirkman.bio.link

and to get the takeaways for this episode please visit: http://www.jenkirkman.com/anxietybitespodcast

To send an email to the show write to anxietybitesweekly at gmail dot com

Anxiety Bites is distributed by the iHeartPodcast Network and co-produced by Dylan Fagan and JJ Posway.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Anxiety Bites podcast, and I am your host,
Jen Kirkman. While I'm doing another episode of Anxiety Bites,
I am your host, Jen Kirkman. Let's talk about the
Vegas nerve. Now, I've heard this term, and I can't
believe in my billions of years working on my anxiety

(00:32):
that no one really ever mentioned it to me. I mean,
I guess you don't need to know what it is,
but it's pretty fascinating to know that we have this
nerve that send signals to almost every part of our body.
And there are ways to stimulate this nerve that don't

(00:52):
involve touching it directly. It's not like a muscle that
you would get a massage on, but that when this
nerve is sort of poop, doubt, it disrupts the signals
it's trying to send to certain parts of our body
for digestion or for you know, thinking. Clearly, it covers
so many different things, and so I guess it's just

(01:13):
more knowledge so that when you think about doing a
relaxation exercise or doing a meditation, you might think, well,
I don't need to do that. I feel okay mentally,
I'm in a good mood. And it's like wessage just
about your mood. You know, you want to stimulate your
vaguas nerve so that things are running a okay in
your body. And it's not something that we have to

(01:35):
like obsess over and worry about. Oh my god, I
didn't stimulate my veguas nerve today, But it's just something
to be aware of that it kind of contributes to
the overall And so there's so much that this nerve
does that I actually have two episodes coming out about it.
Today I'm talking to Dr Novaz Habib about more physical
aspects of the vegas nerve, and he has a book

(01:56):
titled Activate your Vagus Nerve. Unleash your body natural ability
to heal, gut sensitivities, inflammation, brain fog, anxiety, autoimmunity, depression.
And then next week's episode, I'll be talking to someone about,
you know, healing emotional trauma and what emotional trauma does
to the vagus nerves. So at the end of this episode,

(02:19):
before I get to the takeaways, I will read to
you from Dr Habib's book about some of the exercises
that you can do, whether it's daily or ones that
are better to do. Just weakly to help activate the
vagus nerves. I will give you all of them. You
can get the rest in his book, but just to

(02:39):
give you an idea. So I'm just going to get
right to this episode because this is all kind of
newer to me. So let's just let the expert talk
about it, and I don't need to keep babbling about
the vagus nerve. But yeah, I mean this is almost like,
you know, a like the cliff note. It's a version

(03:01):
of what the vagus nerve does. I mean, if you
know a lot about it, you're probably going to sit
there and be like, oh my god, there's so much more,
and it's like I know, I know. Um So anyway,
my guest today, Dr Novas Habb is an author. He's
also the founder of Health Upgraded, a functional medicine and
health optimization clinic in Toronto, Canada. He works with high

(03:22):
performing professionals, athletes, and entrepreneurs to dig a little deeper
and find the answers to what's holding back their health again.
He's also the author of Activate Your Vegas Nerve and
all uh. All links will be in the show notes
right here where you can get the book and find
out more about dr have and for now, let's find

(03:43):
out more about the Vegas nerve. Well, the vagus nerve,
and everyone listening it's not spelled like las Vegas v
A g U S. Sure they know because they're reading along.
But I had heard of the vagus nerve, and throughout

(04:05):
this podcast, smart people I've talked to have casually mentioned it,
and I kept thinking, I have to do a Vegas
nerve episode. And when I read your book, Activate your
Vagus Nerve, unleash your body's natural ability to heal, I
was blown away by everything that our vagus nerve. I'm
not sure if controls is the right word, but I
will say casually controls or has a hand in. And

(04:29):
so let's just start real basic. What is the vagus
nerve and what are the main things in the body
it controls? Yeah, the book, the book goes into a
lot more depth, but we can definitely cover the basics
here and so, um, we we have lots of nerves
in our body. And the reason I talked about this
one is because it's a special nerve. It it really

(04:50):
does a lot more than people realize. It connects to
so many different places. That's in fact why they named it.
The vagus nerve came from the root word of vague
or like I guess it means wandering, meaning that it
goes to so many different places. So it's one of
twelve pairs of cranial nerves that comes out of the
brain stem, which is that little projection just below the

(05:11):
brain as we know it where if you've ever watched
Um the Water Boy, he talks about the medulla oblong dada.
That's exactly where the vegas nerve actually comes out. Where
it comes out. It comes out one on each side.
There's four roots and then they come out and they
connect and then they actually blend together. The right side
and the left side blend together, and it has different

(05:33):
branches that go to a bunch of different areas. Like
all of the other twelve cranial nerves, primarily they're going
to hit areas in the head and face area, so
things like I control and facial muscles are controlled through
the cranial nerves. But the vagus nerve does a bit
more than that, so it does have a little bit

(05:54):
of control in and around the head and neck. It
actually sends a branch to the ear for skin sensation.
It sends a couple of branches to the throat, to
the pharynx, and to the larynx. Those are the muscles
at the back of the throat that allow the airway
to remain open, and the laryngeal muscles, so it helps
to pull and push the the vocal cards. So that

(06:15):
in fact, is what gives us pitch and tone in
our voice. So the reason that can go really really
low or really really high with my voice is because
I have tone or tonally within my vagus nerve sending
signals through there to stretch the muscles and pull the
vocal chords accordingly. But then it continues down and it
actually courses in the neck right beside the carotid artery

(06:36):
in the jugular vein, and what makes things I always
feel like you don't want to hit those exactly. So
it's actually funny enough. It's inside the same sheet that's
inside the same tissue as those two blood vessels. So
those are the blood vessels that supply blood to the
brain and take blood away from the brain. And so
it just goes to show how important this nerve truly is.

(06:59):
Because it gets severed or if anything within that sheath
gets severed, the function of our body is going to
be severely limited. And so as it goes down, it
then enters into the thorax, into the chest area, where
it innervates the heart to control heart rate and do
a whole bunch of other stuff. It goes to the
lungs to monitor the breath rate. Doesn't control it, but
it doesn't monitor it, and that's really important. And it

(07:21):
talks about inflammation, supports the inflammation response within all of
these organs as well. But it doesn't stop there, continues
on down with the esophagus and goes through the diaphragm
into our abdomen, into our belly, where it then innervates
essentially every single organ within the entire belly. There's no
other nerve in the body that does anything like this.

(07:42):
It's going to innervate the spleen, the kidneys, the liver, stomach,
small intestine, large intestine, you name it. Every organ has
some sort of connection to the vegus nerve. And that's
what really stuck out to me about the topic about
this nerve. It's always stuck out to me. I'm a
chiropractor by profession, and so like nerve a system, brain
function has always been a huge piece of my my

(08:04):
journey and understanding health, and so this one always stuck
out as a really important piece of the puzzle, and
so that's why I wanted to share once I learned
a bit more about what it does, that it needed
to be told to people because there's such an important
controlling mechanism here and you were using a word is
it innervate? Is that what you were saying? It means
supplyect right, So it means connect to and send signals to.

(08:26):
More from I do want to talk about this concept
that you do mention in the book that the vagus
nerve has a function in which is gut health. But
before we even get to that, I just have a
really silly question why. I mean, this is just a
philosophical question, but why why have this one nerve do

(08:50):
so much? Isn't that dangerous? And shouldn't it delegate to
other nerves? Is it? Or is there an advantage to
having one nerve do so much? It's a really great question. Um.
If I knew the full answer to that, I think
it would be on par with whatever ultimate being there
is out there. I don't have a full answer to that. Um,

(09:14):
we do know that the parasympathetic nervous system, which is
kind of what that rest digest recovery system is signaled
through the vegas nerve. And yeah, it is a single
point of failure potentially right and certain indices. But I
don't think it was built out with the intention of
ever having been injured, uh severely right, um And so

(09:38):
that's why it's it's encased in a very important sheet.
It connects left and right. It has a couple of
different kind of backup plans. Essentially it can go up
through either side and connect to the same area and
send signals accordingly. Um So, so there is a bit
of a backup plan built into it, but it just
it's more of a therm stat type of function than

(10:01):
it is a signaling out from the brain function. And
so it's not as worries some if anything does happen
that said trauma and injury to the nerve would creative
does create significant challenges to a lot of people. I
want to address this because the words gut health and

(10:22):
mind body connection and inflammation are very popular in our culture.
I think a lot of people take those terms and
run with it in ways that I think are damaging.
So let's demystify these things, because your book goes so
well into explaining and honestly, it's like taking a college
course in you know, biology, but you say in this

(10:46):
bum to read your book to you. One of the
most likely low grade stressors that you may not be
aware of is the bacteria living in and around you.
The population of bacteria living in your gut and on
your skin has a significant effect on us, and if
that population is optimally balanced, it can be a major
stressor on your body. So so let's start there. What

(11:06):
what does that mean? What is gut health? How does
it relate to being a stress around the body, which
I assume would come up in the form of stress, anxiety,
even pain. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. The best way to kind
of simplify this and understand it within context is that
we have between forty and sixty trillion human cells in

(11:29):
our body, and these forty six trillion human cells can't
function on their own in the environment that we are in.
They require support from some external ah cells and organisms,
and these are things that we generally can't see, and
those are the bacteria, parasites, viruses, east horns that are

(11:53):
all around us. With the majority of these other organisms.
We have a sim biotic relationship, meaning that we work
really well with them, and they work really well with us.
Our body provides them with nutrients that they need, they
assimilate and provide us nutrients that we need, and over

(12:14):
the millennia of our revolution, we have evolved to have
this very positive relationship with the vast majority of these
microbiome supporting a microbiome producing populations. So I said, we
have between fourty and sixty trillion human cells in our body.
Just in our large intestine alone, we have over a

(12:37):
hundred trillion bacteria HM. So that population is really quite important.
And I know it sounds a little hokey when we
talk about gut help when we talk about microbiome, but
the scientists finally starting to catch up and it's actually
starting to identify exactly where these challenges can come from
and what this disbiosis meaning imbalance within the gut can

(13:02):
lead to. Okay, I having instituted testing in my own practice,
so I actually help people identify where the challenges are
coming from. Adam microbiome level using stool testing, using DNA
based stool testing to identify exactly what types of bacteria
are around. Yeah, you know, I talk a lot about

(13:24):
on this podcast about the concept of chemical imbalance when
it comes to treating anxiety depression with medication. There's just
no test, you know, and something like this we hear
gut health. I'm glad to hear that there is actually
a way to find out what's in there, what's imbalanced. Yeah,
so this is what what I kind of practice in
my own life and my own journey. I found functional

(13:45):
medicine which really helped me to support my own health.
I used to way to enter fifty pounds, high blood pressure,
borderline diabetes in my twenties and just was dealing with
significant health challenges. Energy was always low, and when I
was introduced to this it was a bit of a
shock to my system. I was going through chiropractic college.
I thought I knew everything about health. I'm gonna be
able to share this with so many people, but I

(14:05):
wasn't implementing it myself. And then when functional medicine came around,
it really helped open my eyes too beyond what we
tend to kind of see in the conventional system. And
the testing was key to this. When we understand biochemically
what's truly going on within our body when we have UH,

(14:26):
the step by step process is shown to us based
on the actual testing that we see through gut testing,
through urinary organic acid testing, through hormone testing. These can
help us to really pick out the specific areas where
we as an individual or having issues. And then this

(14:47):
is where we can kind of marry new world scientific
insights and tools that we have through testing with old
world wisdom that's been there through traditional Chinese medicine, ire
vetic medicine, Mediterranean medicine, and has truly slowly transformed into
kind of this natural alternative care type of idea. Even
though it's not truly alternative, it's something that's been there

(15:08):
for much longer than the conventional system that we're in. Right,
it's an alternative to the newer thing we made up
exactly exactly. So, I've worked with many people that are
dealing with mental health struggles, a lot of people with
autoimmune conditions, a lot of people with these underlying root causes.
And when we identify what that root causes, and it's
often about the time I can identify that microbiome imbalance,

(15:33):
that disbiosis that's going on within the gut, that's affecting
the gut health, and so we actually have scientific like
proof of why the problem is occurring, why we're leading
down this path of inflammatory reactions within the gut that's
leading elsewhere. We also, just as a side note, seventy
percent of our immune cells by volume are located in

(15:55):
the lining of the gut, and so this is where
inflammation will often come up. We have this protective mechanism
because we know that not all good things are in
the gut. It's not all good bacteria, um parasites, worms,
candid to all these things do pop up, and so
we need to protect ourselves from it. And if we're
not providing the right tools for the immune system to

(16:15):
be able to handle those threats, that's where the problems
tend to occur. Um That comes down to diet, that
comes down to breathing, That comes down to vagus nerve activity,
because the vagus nervous supplying information to that area, to
the gut lining, to the inflammatory cells that in fact
controls an entire system called the coolinergic anti inflammatory system

(16:39):
literally is controlled through the vagus nerve. If that signaling
isn't present, then we can't put the brakes on an
accelerator basically, So what I like to say is our
our bodies aren't like a car, and the accelerator is
like the sympathetic nervous system where we go in to
fight or flight. We're in go mode. But when we
get to a red lighter, when we get to a
yellow light, we need to slow down. We need to

(17:01):
be able to shut off or decrease the speed by
which we're going. If we can't do that, we're gonna
cause major issues. Right we're going to go through a
red light, We're gonna hurt somebody potentially. And so the
brakes are the parasympathetic nervous system. The vaguest nerve is
the brakes to the entire system. We'll be right back, Okay,

(17:30):
So the vagus nerve monitors what's going on in the
gut and and again at the end of the episode
will get more solution based. But so there's a world
where not just through diet, which I know does affect
the vaguest nerve, but certain exercises we can do, whether
it's acupuncture or massage or changing our sleep that can

(17:55):
change how the vagus nerve monitors the gut and somehow
help heal or am I kind of relating that in
a way that's not correct. Oftentimes, what exacerbates the issues
that we are experiencing is the fact that the vegas
nerve is under too much pressure. So when we if
we go back to the brakes a little bit, as
a very simple example, brake pads wear out the same

(18:19):
way the vegas nerve can get overworked. If we're constantly
providing inflammatory um challenges to the body, the brakes are
gonna wear out. The vegas nerve can't handle a ton
of constant chronic inflammatory issues that are constantly coming up,
and so slowly and surely the vegas tone is going
to decrease. The ability for our vegas nerve to send

(18:40):
these signals on a regular basis is going to come down.
And so what we need to do is to do
the exercises, do the tools, and provide the vagus nerve
and opportunity to do the work that it needs to
do without providing more chronic inflammatory reactions on a regular basis.
So this is what they do. Um when when we

(19:01):
do the deep breathing exercise, when we do the meditation,
when we do the the good gut health cleanses and
the detoxes, if that's the plan that you want to
go down. Um, what we're essentially doing is we're decreasing
the inflammatory triggers and we're giving the body a chance
to heal itself. The body truly does know how to
heal itself, but we have to give it the right environment,

(19:23):
the right tools, the right inputs to be able to
do so. And so that's where the exercises will help
to provide that initial step. And for some people we
might need to go a step further where we actually
change the microbiome using probiotics, where we actually address specific,
potentially genetic, some somewhat functional imbalances with certain supplements or

(19:47):
certain ingredients that need to be included within their diet.
And that's where we can work on the optimization side
of things, where we can actually help the body to
function at a slightly better level. It's almost like a
bio hacking type of idea, but in a very clinical
and very test based sense, so we know exactly what
we're trying to accomplish. And that's why the vast majority

(20:07):
of people that work with a properly trained functional medicine
practitioner somebody that understands the function of the body really well,
often have really good results. When I think about inflammation,
I often say, if I'm feeling off, I don't know
how to allow us to put it. I might say,
I feel like there's inflammation somewhere. I don't know what
I'm talking about, but it's just become a new word
in my life. And what exactly is inflammation? I mean,

(20:31):
I assume something is literally inflamed or uh. And then
so how does it happen? How do we bring it down?
And kind of demystified this other buzzword I hear a
lot totally. So inflammation is our body's response to trauma
and stress within different ways. And there's there's four different

(20:54):
types of stressors that can trigger inflammatory responses. Emotional stress
is one. We can have this brain inflammation that pops
up that leads to brain fogginess and ability to think clearly,
memory challenges. And this can happen because we're dealing with
relationship stress or financial stress on a day to day basis, kids, etcetera.
And really rough nite with my kids last night, so

(21:15):
I can um. So, emotional stress is one, Psychological stress
is another one. And you may say, well, what's the
difference between emotional and psychological. Psychological is more kind of
past related. What are the challenges that we experienced potentially
as a child, potentially as we were growing up that

(21:36):
created the scratches on the lens through which we see
the world. Right, So I only see the world in
this way because I was affected in a negative way
in the past. Right, What are those emotional attachments that
we have that have created that that scuff on the lens? Okay,
so a little bit different. We always want to look
at the timeline when we're looking at a certain case,

(21:57):
when somebody's experienced potentially trauma or something they were younger,
and then we have physical stress. These are the things
that we think of when we think of inflammation. More commonly,
we're thinking about car accident and we've hurt ourselves whiplash, etcetera.
And now we have to send all of these cells
to this area to help repair the damage. And that's

(22:18):
what inflammation is. Initially in the acute sense, inflammation is
sending these cells to an area that's damage to help
support repair of it. Inflammation is a good thing in
an acute scenario. When that inflammation can't be controlled is
when it becomes a bad thing. And so the physical
sense is like, let's think of a bruise on our arm.
We get this big swelling, we get that inflammatory warm response.

(22:40):
That's because the blood flow is going to that area
to help to repair that damage. So that's a really
simple way to think about it. But physical uh, stress
will create that. And then the last one is biochemical stress,
and this is generally the stuff that we don't see
until it's maybe a little bit late. This is where
food sensitivities can come in for a lot of people

(23:01):
that are dealing with specific sensitivities too. For some people,
gluten for some people, dairy for some people, um, nightshade,
vegetables can do it, for some people, meat can do it. Right, Like,
different people have different triggers that can create this biochemical response,
So for some people it's a food based thing, but
for a lot of other people. We have to add
it to this entire realm of toxic ingredients that are

(23:24):
around us, right, the pesticides that are sprayed on our foods,
the inorganic laundry detergent that we use, or the chemicals
that are on receipt paper when we get our receipt
from Costco or from wherever we're shopping. As we walk out,
we're holding this receipt paper which is sending bisphenol a
b p A into our bloodstream. The longer you hold that,

(23:46):
by the way, the more you're gonna absorb. So do
your best to just toss your receipt onto the carpeople
as much as you can. Yes, the CBS receipts are
killing us, that's exactly right. So we want to be
really careful about this toxic burden because that excess toxin

(24:07):
load that our body then has to handle will only
add to the inflammatory response that our body is going
to create. We have a lot that we have to
deal with. Our liver is detoxifying constantly, and if our
body doesn't have the capacity to handle it, then as
a toxic burden goes up, that biochemical stress increases, our
inflammatory response gets hindered more and more. And so the

(24:27):
response is what's mediated through the vagus nerve. How do
we help to limit how much inflammation is occurring. Inflammation
is good, like I said, in an acute scenario, it
helps to repair tissue. It sends the cells to the
area that are going to help repair the white blood
cells the fibroblasts. They don't need to get into the specifics,
but it's gonna send the specific cells to that area

(24:48):
through the blood to repair damage. If that does not
get controlled, then our immune response and our inflammatory response
is uncontrolled, and that's where the problem will occur when
we have chronic inflammation. Chronic uncontrolled inflammation is essentially we're
stepping on the accelerator and not allowing the brakes to

(25:09):
do their job, not allowing the brakes to slow it
down and to limit inflammation. The way inflammation occurs within
the body is a traumatic incident of some sort occurs,
we send cells to the area. There's a ton of
chemical reactions. Don't need to get into the specifics, but
that's going to send more and more cells to the
area to repair. If it happens in certain areas like joints,

(25:31):
we're gonna get things like rheumatoid ar thornies. If it
happens in the thyroid, we're gonna get hashimotos there. If
it happens in the brain, we could get things like
MS or brain fog or significant challenges that occur long term.
We need to control the inflammation, and that signal is
sent through the vagus nerve via that col allergic anti
inflammatory system which is mediated there, so where the vaggest

(25:55):
nerves the brakes to help control what that inflammation is
going to do. So if I a person who is
suspect that maybe I have some inflammation in my body,
I am feeling whatever that feels like because of the
vagus nerve. Is that correct it. When the vagus nerve
identifies that there are inflammatory signals around our body, it

(26:18):
can signal upwards via signals that go from the body
to the brain through the vagus nerve. Yes, but it's
not the same as like when you feel somebody touching
your hand. Those are going through scaltal nerves that those
are the nerves that go via our spinal cord. So
there's different nerves that will have different functions. We can't

(26:40):
truly feel through our vagus nerve. It's not feeling from
like a sense perspective. It's more of autonomic monitoring. So
think of it more like the thermostatic of our of
our body. Anxiety bites will be right back after a
quick little message from one of our sponsors. You mentioned

(27:09):
that acute inflammation is part of how the body heals
and a really good example of something on your arms swelling.
We're going to have a little lump there for a while.
But when something is chronically inflamed, that's when it's moved
into a disordered area. And that is again another through
line that happens throughout this podcast. Is the same for anxiety.

(27:33):
You know, we need our acute moments of anxiety so
that we don't get hit by a car or we
know to respond to something, and then it's disordered when
we feel that way all of the time. If I'm
experiencing brain fogged because of inflammation in my brain, is
my brain literally swollen. I'll give you an example. My
dad um ten years ago. He's fine now, thank god,

(27:56):
but fell down, hit his head and had a subdural
hematomy and his brain a swelling. Because I'm not telling
you this, but you know, to the listeners and correct
me if I'm wrong. But the there was blood starting
to pool and his brain was swelling and moving away
from it so you know, to protect itself. And then
of course that caused him not to be able to speak.
He was making no sense. He had to have a

(28:17):
surgery to drain the blood. Now obviously that's not what
my brain is doing when I'm having brain fog, But
is it not to a small extent that's exactly right,
to a very very small extent, not to the point
where it's actually going to trigger a pressure increase within
the cranial cavity like it does in the case of
your father's with subderal hematoma. So with an acute physical

(28:42):
trauma where you hit your head, whether it's a traumatic
brain injury of some sort, whether it's a whiplash style
or concussion style injury, those are physical reasons for inflammation
to occur within the brain, uh in and around the brain,
And subderal means just below in the ninjis, so it's
in the casing around the brain. When that happens, when
there's bone that's kind of blocking it, then we actually

(29:05):
have this swelling that's physically pushing on the brain. Right.
So this is like it's going to affect a specific area. Say,
for example, in your dad's case, it was affecting his
speech area, as inability to speak came from physically having
pressure on that area. When it comes to something like
a biochemical respond to biochemical inflammation, we're looking at just

(29:28):
activation of some of the cells within the brain and
the nervous system itself, and these are called glial cells
and astro sites. These cells make up they're they're called
glial cells because they were initially thought to be the glue,
but they're really the immune cells within the brain. And
so what they do is they are the ones that
are constantly making sure that there isn't any damage occurring

(29:52):
within the brain. They're proning nerve endings, They're making sure
that the nerves are are functioning at the best possible leve.
But when they become hyperactivated because we're under some sort
of stress, some sort of inflammatory response, usually within our gut,
and we can get into that, it's going to trigger
it's going to trigger the glial cells to do too much,

(30:14):
and so they will actually shut down more neurons than
they need to, and that actually slows processing speed within
our brain. Oh that is so well explained. Okay, So
we've got these little glial cells and they're doing their
thing and they're making everything nice. So I'm experiencing stress
brain fog, and now it's saying, oh boy, she she

(30:35):
can't handle all this. Let me shut down some neurons.
And that's like the last thing I need. And so
now I'm having trouble maybe with memory or I'm just
feeling a little bit unable to perform my tasks or
my job at the level I'm used to brain fog,
and that is coming from some kind of stress either

(30:55):
in my body or emotional stress exactly right all together.
So now tell me about that connection with the gut. Yeah,
so this is the best part where we actually get
into that gut brain access gut brain connection. When we
are a fetus, we develop out if things called so mights. Okay,
so we've got literally these chunks of cells that are

(31:18):
stem cells that progenerate into different types of tissues, and
the same so might that develops into our blood brain barrier,
literally the brain barrier that controls what blood can send
into the brain and what can come out, also develops
the exact same thing in the gut, and that is
the gut lining that essentially is what protecting our body,

(31:41):
our human cells from what's living within the tube of
our intestines and our stomach and etcetera. And so the
lining of the gut and the lining of the blood
brain barrier come from the same things, meaning that if
we have some sort of reaction to microbiome imbalance. We
have some sort of food sensitivity that causes a leakiness
with the our gut, a breakdown of that lining within

(32:02):
the gut. It will eventually create a breakdown of the
lining within the brain, and so that leads to inflammation
that can get into the brain, creating that glial cell activation,
creating brain fog, creating those challenges internally at a very
low microscopic level, but it does occur, and this is
something that's been proven time and time again in the science.

(32:24):
More recently then, I think, is serotonin produced in a
large intestine as well. Right of the serotonin within our
body is located within the gut and the gut lining.
So generally with the medication side of things, you're looking
at an SSRI I a selective serotonin a re uptake inhibitor,
meaning that the serotonin that gets released into the synapse

(32:46):
where the actual occurrence of these narrow transmitters occurs, where
the chemical reaction is that the serotonin is sent out
into the synapse and the post synaptic membrane essentially where
the signal is sent to. What we're trying to do
is keep more of the serotonin in the synapse. We're
not trying to reuptake or bring that serotonin back into

(33:06):
the neural and so the inhibitors will create a state
of more serotonin present within the synapse, within that gap area.
Oftentimes it's occurring because in certain cases there's a genetic
predisposition to not being able to produce serotonin, and in
some cases it's because you have a methylation issue that

(33:28):
you're not able to break that serotonin down effectively. And
so there is a very common, very very real connection
between taking anti anxiety, anti depressive medications and the effect
that it than has in the gut, because it's affecting
that ninety four percent of serotonin located within the gut.
Lining and talk to me about IBS and the vagat

(33:51):
nerve and mental health, because I always feel like a
few people have mentioned on this show that they themselves
had ibas and it was a direct line with panic attacks.
And and again, this is one of those things where
we're not saying it's in your head, you don't have IBS,
and we're not saying, oh, it's your fault, you have it.
You need to you know, um meditate twice a day

(34:11):
and it'll go away. But but what is the connection there?
There is a middle point there for sure, and so
that is linked to that serotonin that's located in the gut.
Lining Just from from kind of a personal thing, I
really dislike the diagnosis irritable bowel syndr ome. Literally they're
telling you that your bowel is irritable, and you're the

(34:32):
one that told them that your bottler is are irritable.
Whether it's conservation diarrhea, some sort of trigger um, so
they're just turning words to say that it's something called
IBS that said what's causing that? Right? Like? Why why
is there an imbalance? And that comes down to two
different things. Either you're not getting great signaling from your

(34:52):
brain through your vegas nerve to those intestines where they
can actually then go and do their job. Or second,
there's a microbiome inbalance that's triggering it. And so no
meditation twice a day is not going to solve it, right,
it's not going to affect it that well. We need
to be able to identify why is it a combination

(35:13):
of those two and in what state and what sense
is it a combination of those two. That's where the
testing really comes in handy. So when we have dysbiosis,
when we have a bacterial in balance, what's essentially happening
is that relationship between our bacteria and our human cells
is not as symbiotic as we want it to be,
and that creates leakiness, and that creates those micro inflammation

(35:35):
things in that se of immune cells located in the
gut lining, the vagus nerve is going to signal to
the intestines to keep food moving along peristalsis. And if
we don't have that signal occurring, then we have stagnation.
We have things that either slow it down or speed
it up way too much, and that can lead to
diarrhea or constipation, and in some cases both either you're

(35:56):
completely on one side or you're completely on the other,
or you flip back and forth, and so it's it's
generally a vagus nerve signal that not strong because you're
under it some sort of excessive stress that's burnt down
the brakes and there's some sort of biochemical imbalance that's occurring.
So it's a chicken in the eggs scenario. It can

(36:17):
be vagus nerve only, it can be dis biosis only
by the when it's combined, that's when we really get
this diagnosis of IBS. And then because it's so heavily
linked to the serotonin levels and so heavily linked to
neurotransmitters and the entire nervous system, there's a heavy linked
between anxiety, depression and got health issues like IBS. So

(36:39):
that makes sense because the vegas nerve has so many
things to monitor. If it's busy monitoring my suritable bowels,
as you say, it's not really what it is, but
which I appreciate it. I totally get that. Um I
hate the way some things are named. It makes me
crazy if I'm doing things, and we'll get to it
to activate my vagus nerve if I am meditating and

(36:59):
do breathing. One thing that's helping is that it's decreasing
some of the stress on the vagus nerves, so that
in a way philosophically, it should be helping two distress
that vagus nerves that has those worn outbreaks so that
it can do its jobs. But we still have to

(37:21):
attend to the actual body part that it's affecting. But
if you are only attending to your IBS and you're
stressing about it, you know, maybe give yourself a little
bit of a leg up by trying to reduce the
stress around your chronic illness. That's exactly right. It's counterintuitive
to be stressed out about something while trying to fix it. Again,

(37:43):
I think with the casual way that people throw around
things like mind body connection, I think when people are
in that really sensitive state of stress around something physical,
it really sounds like someone is saying it's all in
your head, or the only way to solve it is
in your head. And and so I'm glad we just

(38:03):
broke it down. So a couple other things in your
book that we're very interesting to me was the vegas
nerve and its effect on heart rate, breathing, vocal cords
even but there was one I just want to clear
this one up because you talk about someone having a
dysfunctional heart rate and someone who may faint, and you

(38:28):
say that you know, at that point the autonomic system
is unable to regulate the heart and blood vessels. Could
be genetic, could be some kind of outside trauma, like
you know, a pregnancy or something. But so there are
there people that they don't just have what we have,
which is occasionally the vagus nerve has some worn down
brake pads, but they have a chronic thing that is

(38:51):
vegas nerves specific. Yeah, I wouldn't go as Yeah, I
think when you get into something like vasil vagel sync
could be where there's ing, where there's actual like pots.
For example, when you get up from a standing or
from a laying position into a standing position and you
have an immediate hypotension, meaning your blood pressure drops significantly.

(39:12):
Because it's monitored through the vegas nerves, the vagus nerve
can't signal that information up. Then often people will have
balance issues, falling, fainting, etcetera. Um, I think it's just
that's that's when there's actual physical breakdown of the vegas
nerve function. So it's a the brakes are borne down
even further but in a different area, so it's more

(39:35):
heart focused, more lung focused, rather than it being gut focused.
And so those people may and again it may be
genetic like there's nothing they can't do about it. I
wouldn't No, I would say that there is absolutely something
they can do about it, but sometimes the therapy needs
to be a bit more aggressive. It's probably the best

(39:56):
way to put that. Whether it's like a a stib
other type of therapy. Whether there's something else from like
a functional neurological perspective that can be addressed to help
rebuild the brake pads in the other areas, we we
can go and do that. Genetically, there are some predisposition,
but genetics never pulls the trigger. Genetics only loads the gun, right,

(40:18):
And so I hear it way too often that, well,
my family had this, so I'm going to have it.
I have family history of this, so I'm yeah, you
might be at a higher risk. Genetics really only plays
about a thirty role in the production of an issue
in the next generation. It's it's that's something that's been
proven over and over again. Now, but um, about of

(40:40):
what you are actually experiencing is because of your environment
and because of the stressors and how you respond to
those stressors emotional, psychological, biochemical, and physical. So that's what
I would say would probably be the best way to explain,
like how to distinguish between genetics and environment is if
you know what genetics are saying, then you can make

(41:02):
your environment do what it needs to do to support it.
We'll continue the interview on the flip side of a
quick message from our sponsors. Lastly, Okay, so you talk
about in your book breathing incorrectly, which again is you know,

(41:24):
nobody wants to hear this out there in the anxiety world.
We want a quicker fix. But most of us can
be just breathing incorrectly, not even in a moment of panic,
just the way we exist every minute of the day.
What I'm assuming we're hyperventilating ourselves by taking short, quick breaths,
is that is that what you mean by breathing incorrectly

(41:45):
in your to some extent, Yeah, exactly. If you watch
a newborn baby breathe, just have them laid down. Like
next time you're around somebody with a young baby, just
watch what they're doing when they're laying down, especially, watch
what the breathing pattern is. Check to see if their
lungs are expanding at their chest level or if it's
their belly that's going up and down. I guarantee you

(42:08):
you will see it. It's their belly. Their belly is
rising and falling ever so slightly enough. But that's a
sign that we should be breathing in that pattern. Now
of people breathe incorrectly often times that's something that we've
learned to do. Okay, So I see it in my kids.
I have a five year old daughter, I have a

(42:28):
one year old daughter. I get anxious because of it
a lot myself, but I see, even with my five
year old that her breathing patterns have shifted into becoming
a lot more chest based when we breathe with just
our chest muscles. And so i'll act. For example, I'll
get her to take a deep breath when she's getting
stressed out, when she gets riled up, she's at a

(42:51):
theme park or doesn't want to eat the food. She
gets into this hyper mentality state and she's just using
her upper back muscles for her accessory breathing muscles around
her lungs, and she's sucking in her belly when she's
trying to take in that deep breath. It's exactly paradoxical
to what we should be doing. If you watch the baby, right,

(43:13):
the baby in their non stressed state is going to
be breathing with their belly. When we get into this
paradoxical breathing where we're actually sucking our diaphragm up, and
that's creating um, not a great vacuum. By which we
then can suck in air. It's a not allowing the
diaphragm to do the job that it needs to do.

(43:33):
The diaphragm is the primary breathing muscle, and so we
need to be breathing through a diaphragm first, no question
about it. That's the biggest thing that most people, both
within the anxiety world and well outside the anxiety of world,
I should I assure you vast majority of breathing incorrectly.
It's not you, it's what we've been taught. We've been

(43:53):
taught that big bellies are bad. We've been taught that
the when we're stressed, we have to kind of get
into the state. And it's a subconscious thing. It's not
something that we've been aware of. And so what we
need to do is retrain ourselves to get into the
state that Okay, we're in an anxious state. Close your
eyes for a second, and I'm sure you've heard this
a billion times, but take a deep breath? Right? What

(44:14):
does that mean when you say take a deep breath?
Often times we're gonna go and we're gonna take that
deep breath in our chest and we're not doing it correctly.
We need to breathe with our belly. So simple exercise
for everybody to do. If you put your one hand
on your chest, one hand on your belly, and I
ask you to take a deep breath, but I want
you to keep an eye on is which hand is

(44:37):
moving when you take that deep breath in, And the
answer should always be the hand that's on your belly.
It should expand as you breathe in, and it should
retract and go back in as you breathe out. What
that means is you're using your diet fram and so
if you can think of it this way. Even with

(44:57):
my five year old, I do this, so it tends
to work most of the time. I tell her we
have two balloons. We have a balloon in our chest
and we have a balloon in our belly. And when
she's stressed out, I asked her and I put my
hands on her belly. I get her to lie down.
If it can sure go with it, and I'll say,
I want you to blow up this balloon over here,

(45:20):
and I have to touch it so that she feels
this is where I wanted to come. And so when
she takes that deep breath in the first few times
it's going to be a chest breath, and I say no,
over here, we need to do it on your belly.
And so we eventually, after three or four or five breaths,
will see all of a sudden, the breath is shifting
into the belly and we're expending that balloon. So I
want everybody as a very simple visualization, as a really

(45:42):
easy tool. We don't want to inflate this balloon. We
want to inflate the balloon below. What it's going to
do is it's going to create a vacuum within our
diaphragm and we're actually gonna inflate the lungs. Further. What
that's going to do is when the diaphragm is going
up and down the way it should be, that is
actually creating this signal in the vagus nerve. It's actually
physically prodding the vagus nerve to say, we are in

(46:06):
a calm state, and now you can turn on Now
you can do your rest digestive recover work. You can
turn on the digestive system again, you can turn on
the anti inflammatory system again. The breath truly is the
answer to this. What we want to do is allow
us to shift into this parasympathetic belly breathing state and

(46:27):
train our bodies to be able to do so. And
that's how the breathing pattern is going to positively affect
your vagus nerve activation in which state you're in. You know,
in the first ten years of my anxiety recovery, everyone
told me to take deep breaths, and most people did
not explain to me how to do it. And I
finally learned. But for me, uh, that created an extra

(46:51):
anxiety for me in that I didn't trust it. You know,
you get obsessed with feeling the air in your lungs
almost and think the only way to do it is
to do it. I just did go and I lift
up my shoulders, and it took a while for me
to be able to transition from not being so obsessed

(47:11):
with feeling that completion um which you still can get
from diaforgmatic breathing. But I would have to calm down
first some other way, and then I would be able
to do diaphorgumatic breathing because I was. I don't know,
I just trained myself wrong for for so many years.
What I love about your book and I'll leave everyone

(47:32):
with this to get it on their own. So few
books do this. They'll say, oh, do this exercise you
really spell it out at the end chapter. Here, you've
got weekly practices for activating the vegas nerve. You tell
people how many times a week they should do it.
Monthly practices, and you know when you talk about social
interactions one to two times weekly, listening to music, meditation,

(47:52):
and mindfulness practice three to seven times weekly. I mean,
these are things that you can incorporate into what you're
already doing, you know, right before you go to bed
or something like that. And now that we know how
much the vagus nerve controls and all the stress that
it has, I'm hoping that people understand how important it
is to do these things, not just when we're feeling stressed,
was my point exactly. Yeah, it's something that needs to

(48:14):
be practiced and and built out as like a day
to day practice. So even if you go back one page,
there's even the daily practices there as well, which talks
about gargling and humming and gag reflex activation if you
want to go that far, Like there's there's quite a
few things that we can do that we can simply
tie to, like brushing our teeth, for example, when brush
your teeth, then gargle. Here's a great like thirty second

(48:36):
add onto what you're already doing. If we can piggyback
a lot of these newer habits onto older habits, make
it an easy thing that it becomes a practice that
we can do on a regular basis. And this is
where the compound effect really truly comes into play within
our body. If we can be consistent and regular with
these things, you can create really positive changes. All right,

(48:59):
And as almost I have some exercises for you, dr
have you when I were talking a little bit off
Mike after rerecorded, and he said that something he's training
himself to do is to turn the shower on extremely
cold at the end of the shower. And you know
how if you do that, you normally tense up, and

(49:20):
so he's relaxing and doing you know, calm breathing exercises
during that, because bursts of cold like that and staying
calm through it are really good for the vegas nerve.
You know, I wish I could do that. I can't believe,
you know, Usually there's nothing I within reason won't try,
and I think it's within reason, but I can't bring

(49:41):
myself to do it, but that's something you could try
if you aren't terrified of things that are freezing on
your skin. There are some daily practices you can do
to activate the vegas nerve that you might be doing already.
But gargling. Um. You can gargle twice a day when
you brush your teeth in the morning and at night. Humming.
You can hum on your daily commute to bookend your day.

(50:04):
Practice humming deep in your throat and your day with
a cold shower. Start with um, you know, just thirty seconds,
and as it becomes easier, increase the time by thirty
seconds to sixty seconds every three days, until maybe even
your entire shower is taken under cold water. Something you
can do daily is practice three to five minutes of

(50:25):
deep breathing in a quiet space before each meal. This
will help you calm down and improve your digestion. Sunlight exposure.
Go out and expose your skin to the sun within
thirty minutes of sunrise in the middle of the day
and within thirty minutes of sunset for at least a
minimum of five minutes. And you can put a pillow
between your knees to keep you firmly sleeping on your

(50:48):
side each night. Those are daily practices that you can
do to activate the vagus nerve, and if you have
time during the week, yoga pilates are light exercise, any
kind of abbit of movement. Sweating is important. Social interaction,
maybe don't sweat um and then go meet your friends,
take one of those cold showers in between. Make a

(51:09):
point to meet with friends or family in person at
least once a week. Laugh as much as you can.
Listen to music at least a few times a week.
Do grocery shopping, do cleaning one to two times weekly,
and a meditation and mindfulness practice five to ten minutes
a day at least three times a week and monthly.

(51:32):
Check into massage therapy, chiropractic care, acupuncture treatment are all
great for stimulating the vegas nerve. So let's get into
the specific takeaways from this episode. So the Vegas nerve
v A g U S connect to so many different places.
It was named Vegas as it comes from the root

(51:53):
word vague, meaning wandering. The Vegas nerve comes out of
the Medulla Oblanca. It has different branches that go to
a bunch of different areas. Like all of the other
twelve cranial nerves. They hit areas in the head and
the face. It sends a bunch to the ear for
skin sensation. It sends branches to the throat, the parynx
and the larynx. Those are the muscles at the back

(52:15):
of the throat that allow the airway to remain open.
It helps to push and pull the vocal cord, and
so the vagus nerve is what gives us the pitch
and the tone in our voice. The nerve continues down
and choruses in the neck beside the carotid artery and
the jugular vein. It also innervates the heart to control
the heart rate. It goes to the lungs to monitor

(52:35):
the breath rate. It supports the inflammation response in all
of these organs, and it continues on down with the
esophagus and through the diaphragm into our abdomen, and it
innervates essentially every single organ in the entire stomach, the spleen,
the kidneys that liver, the small intestine, in the large intestine,
and innervate means to supply an organ or a body

(52:56):
part with nerves. There is no other nerve even the
body that does anything like the vagus nerve. The vegas
nerve is very important. If it gets severed, the function
of our body is going to be severely limited. It's
not worrisome if anything happens to the nerve, but trauma
or injury to it would create significant challenges to people.

(53:20):
The parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest
is signaled through the vegas nerve. The vegas nerve can
be thought of as having more of a thermostat type
function than a signaling out from the brain function. According
to Dr Habib's book, quote, one of the most likely

(53:40):
low grade stressors that you may not be aware of
is the bacteria lining um and living in and around you.
The population of bacteria living in your gut and on
your skin has a significant effect on us, and if
that population isn't optimally balanced, it can be a major
stressor on your body. End quote. The science of gut
health is that if there is um I'm going to

(54:03):
mess up this word again, microbiome imbalance dys biosis is
going on within the gut and that effects gut health
and causes an inflammatory reaction which can affect autoimmune conditions
and mental health. Not all bacteria and parasites in our
gut are good, and we need to protect ourselves from
it and give our immune system the right tools to
handle the threats. And that comes down to diet and

(54:26):
even breathing. And that's due to the vagus nerve activity
because the vagus nerve is supplying information to the gut,
lining the inflammatory cells that control an anti inflammatory system,
and the gut is controlled through the vagus nerve. What
can exacerbate issues is that the vagus nerve is under
too much pressure. In the same way that our car
brake pads wear out, the vagus nerve can get overworked.

(54:50):
If we're constantly providing inflammatory challenges to the body, the
brakes are going to wear out. The vagus nerve can't
handle a ton of constant chronic lammatory issues that are
constantly coming up, and over time, the tone is going
to decrease. The ability for the nerve to send signals
on a regular basis is going to lessen. We need

(55:12):
to do the exercises that provide the vaguest nerve and
opportunity to do the work that it needs to do
without providing more chronic inflammatory reactions on a regular basis.
When we do deep breathing or meditation or gut health detoxes,
what we're doing is decreasing the inflammatory triggers and giving
the body a chance to heal itself. Inflammation is our

(55:33):
body's response to trauma and stress in different ways. There
are four different types of stressors that can trigger inflammatory responses.
Emotional stress that can lead to brain fog and inability
to think clearly and memory challenges. Psychological stress different than
emotional stress because psychological is related more to the past,
the challenges we experienced as children that color the way

(55:54):
we see the world today. Physical stress. This could be
something literal like a car accident cause whip flash, but
basically acute inflammatory is necessary, but it means that cells
are being repaired, but any extra inflammatory action is going
to cause physical stress. Biochemical stress. This can be food sensitivities,
whether you're allergic to gluten or dairy, or pesticides that

(56:16):
are sprayed on foods and organic laundry detergent, et cetera.
Most people don't breathe correctly. If you observe a newborn
baby breathing, their belly is rising and falling naturally. Adults
breathing correctly, and they use their upper back muscles and
accessory breathing muscles, which causes a hyperventilated state. The diaphragm

(56:37):
is the primary breathing muscle and so we need to
be breathing through our diaphragm first. That's it. That's all
I've got for you today, and I once again thank
you for tuning into Anxiety Bites. You can send an
email Anxiety Bites weekly at gmail dot com. Tell me
what you love about the show, what you've learned, If
you want to share things that you know about anxiety

(56:58):
that work for you, I hope I get the chance
to read it on air, give it five stars on
Spotify or Apple podcast, tell a friend, talk about it
on social media. You can tag me on Twitter at
Jen Kirkman, tag me in your Instagram story, also at
Jen Kirkman on Instagram. And if you want to read
the takeaways from this or any episode, head over to

(57:19):
my website Jen Kirkman dot com and click Anxiety Bites
and of course that link is in the show notes
as we speak. Thanks again for listening and remember Anxiety Bites,
but you're in control. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcast, or wherever

(57:41):
you listen to your favorite shows.