Do you suffer from stress and anxiety? Does it ever happen where one negative
event can just spin you out for the whole day? Maybe someone cuts you off in traffic,
you get a negative comment on a social media post, or someone sends you a text message from your past
and suddenly you're ruminating and you're worrying and you just can't get out of the rut? If so,
you might be suffering from what's referred to as low vagal tone and vagus nerve reset exercises
can sometimes help to snap you out of it. Hey, my name is Lucas. I'm a yoga teacher and a teacher
trainer. In this video we'll chat about vagal tone and also some vagus nerve reset poses that
you can use at home to hopefully help you find more balance. Quick disclaimer here: some of
the exercises that we'll do deliberately change your blood pressure. So if you have hypertension,
or heart disease, or glaucoma, please check with your doctor. If you'd like to skip forward to the
exercises, you'll find a PDF down below as well. So before we chat about vagus nerve reset poses
let's talk about vagal tone and let's talk about your autonomic nervous system. Your
autonomic nervous system has two main branches. You've probably heard about your sympathetic
nervous system branch, that's fight-or-flight. And then your parasympathetic rest and digest.
That's an over simplification, but you get the idea. Fight-or-flight, rest and digest, and your
vagus nerve is largely responsible for this rest and digest response. That's why people like me,
yoga teachers, that's why meditation teachers, it's why mind-body wellness experts, that's why
everyone's talking about the vagus nerve, because it helps to promote that rest and digest response,
which tends to be more preferable in our modern world. When we talk about having low vagal tone
that's when you have trouble with self-soothing. Let me give you a specific example so you can
understand what I mean. Let's imagine you're crossing the street and you almost get hit by
a car and you jump out of the way and your heart is racing, your breath is heaving,
and if you have low vagal tone that one event might ruin your day. You're nervous,
you can't eat, you're calling your mother, you're writing your final will and testament,
you just can't get anything done, you can't seem to kick that moment, that moment has ruined your
day. That would be an example of someone with low vagal tone. Now somebody with high vagal tone
what happens is the same thing, their heart races, their breath heaves,
and for some period of time you will also be completely flustered, right. But it might be
20 minutes, it might be 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and then you're able to let it go, self-soothe and
get on with your day. That's what we're looking for, a healthy, balanced nervous system. You'll
never bulletproof all of the negative stimuli in life. They're still going to hit you, but you
want to respond rather than react, you want the ability to self-soothe and get on with your day,
and that's what we're looking for with high vagal tone. Well great, how do we get high vagal tone?
Well the way you do it is through the way that you do holistic health in general. Exercise,
diet, sleep, all of these things are really good for your nervous system and creating balance,
but there are some tricks, there are some hacks, these are things that are medically backed,
these are things that have been researched that can be really effective for in the short term.
If you find yourself completely frazzled you can reset your vagus nerve in many cases and you can
override your nervous system and help yourself to self-soothe. Let's take a look at some exercises,
the first one is cold therapy. To understand this first exercise it's helpful to think about
Hollywood movies and the climax scene. Maybe the main character is getting ready for a rap
battle, or to go to war, or to get married, or whatever it might be in these Hollywood films,
that main character often goes to the bathroom and washes their face with
cold water. They look themselves in the eyes and they're ready to go. There's actually
pretty good scientific data to back that up. What happens when you put cold water over your face,
specifically your cheeks and even more importantly on the sides of your neck,
is it stimulates something called your mammalian dive reflex. Heart rate slows,
heart rate variability increases, and you get a vagus nerve reset. It's very predictable and it
happens pretty well simply with washing your face. But there are better ways to do it. Now exactly
why it happens we're not sure, but the fact that it does happen is pretty clear. Rather than simply
washing your face, the clinical data, the research that i'll share with you down below, shows that
even more effective is if you take something like a cold compress. This is just a cooler from a
picnic basket that you might have in your freezer and you put this cold compress on either side of
your neck alternating 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off. Now if your ice pack is too cold obviously
wrap it in a towel. The idea is not to ice burn your skin, it's simply to add cold to either side
of your neck. So I've got an ice pack and I've got a timer and I'll do 15 seconds on either side.
Whenever I show people this cold therapy technique, very often they say "oh yeah, I
love to take cold showers" or they say "oh yeah, I love to do cold exposure" and they show me photos
of them swimming in a garbage can filled with ice. That's cold exposure, that has very,
very interesting health benefits, physiological benefits, but that's a different type of practice.
In many cases full body cold exposure can actually stimulate epinephrine, norepinephrine,
that's a stress response. That's not what we're looking for in this particular exercise. Much
better to have control, much better to focus on that localized region, so you don't slip into
a stress response. The thing I like about this is you can keep this cold pack in your freezer,
even at work, and you can do this really any time to self-soothe. This exercise is called a modified
valsalva maneuver. It's used by emergency rooms EMTs, especially when people have tachycardia,
like an elevated runaway heart rate. They use this maneuver to slow people's heart rate down, but you
can use it as a vagus nerve reset. We'll inhale and then close our nose and mouth and push out,
but don't exhale, for 15 seconds. This increases your intrathoracic and intra-abdominal pressure.
It's kind of like giving your body a big bear hug. And then when we release, we'll elevate our
legs. That's the modified version, and the blood flow will rush in and this change of pressure
triggers your vagus nerve and can really help to slow your heart rate, increase your heart rate
variability, and again, reset your vagus nerve. I'm monitoring my heart rate. Let's see how it
works here. Hopefully you'll be able to see my heart rate drop, specifically as I lie down on
my back. Let's do it together. I've got a timer here for 15 seconds, that's the hold part, and
then I'll relax on my back, and elevate my legs, and breathe through my nose. We'll do it together.
Elevate my legs at 45 degrees, breathe through my nose, and relax.
So you could repeat that exercise up to four times. I usually just do it once
or twice. The final practice we'll do I call balloon breathing and this is a very, very simple
and lighter version of that previous valsalva maneuver. It's not as effective, but here's what
I like about it. You just need a little balloon and a timer, you can do this anywhere. I also
like this because you can get kids to do it a lot easier than some of these other practices.
How it works is I'll inflate the balloon, hold for 15 seconds, and then release. Again, I'm doing my
best to create a little bit more intrathoracic, intra abdominal pressure, to squeeze and release,
to have that blood pressure change, which will again switch my vagus nerve. Let's give it a try.
Good. Now if you feel dizzy of course take a break, give yourself a little bit of a rest.
What we're trying to do is actively push against something. I like to use a balloon,
some people use an empty syringe, which is a little bit medical and weird. Let's try it again.
Good. So 15 seconds on, about 30 seconds off. I like to do this about four times. Again,
you can carry this with you anywhere that you go. Hopefully these exercises have been
helpful for you. As a reminder, there's a PDF of the poses that we've covered down below.
If you'd like to find my teaching calendar you can always find that at yogabody.com.
If you'd like more science-based yoga videos hit subscribe down below. I do my best to answer all
my own comments, so if you have questions or comments post those down below as well.
Thanks so much for joining me and I'll see you in the next video.