Strengthen Your Vagal Brake for a Balanced Nervous System

Just like training your muscles so they're healthy and strong, you can learn to work with your nervous system to make it more adaptable, balanced, flexible and resilient. The key to this is the VAGUS NERVE.

The branch of the vagus nerve connecting your brain to your heart is known as the VAGAL BRAKE. Just like when riding a bike downhill you'd keep the brake slightly engaged so you don't go too fast, the vagal brake influences your nervous system by keeping a brake on your heart. As the vagal brake releases, your heart rate increases, giving you energy and focus to meet demands. A healthy vagal brake will re-engage soon afterwards, and you'll return to a self-regulated baseline.

This finely tuned mechanism is what allows more energy into your nervous system to focus and step up to a challenge, without turning on stress hormones. You're flexible and adaptable. Chronic and traumatic stress affect the vagal brake's ability to slow you back down when times are tough It's like the brakes are always off so you're not starting from a regulated baseline because there's already arousal in the nervous system.

Then, when you face challenges, even a minor one, you'll move into fight-flight-freeze when there may not be an external threat. Signs of a fight response could be overreacting, starting an argument, storming off, making angry demands in person or online. Signs of a flight response could be finding it difficult to sit still, leaving or avoiding a situation, becoming perfectionistic about work and strong waves of anxiety.

The default response of freeze means you could become paralysed with extreme procrastination, feel spacey, numb overwhelmed by the situation. These three states can make it hard to come up with creative solutions to problems, to have perspective, to control impulses and to make choices that are in interest of your values.

Fight-flight-freeze can become your "go-to" responses for challenges. This creates highly sensistised pathways that can easily get triggered. It's an emotionally and physically taxing way to manage what's happening, and makes it hard to move towards your goals or what you value. When you can experience a different response in your nervous system under stress, you're taking a new pathway and teaching your nervous system a different way to respond.

Although repeated events of your past have shaped how your nervous system responds to stress, what you deliberately cultivate with self-regulation exercises will program the new responses for your mind- body system that appropriately match what your experience. This "work-out" for your nervous system is what creates change to the vagal brake and also the survival brain.

Over time and with practice you can access and use a range of options innate to the brain and nervous system, that support you to face challenges and grow, without getting stuck in survival mode. This is what ends swinging between the highs of anxiety and overdoing, and the lows of shut-down and burnout.

Just like we say a muscle that's strong has good "tone", higher vagal tone means your nervous system is flexible and adaptable in how it responds to challenges and demands. The essence of resilience is returning to regulation, and the vagal brake plays a key role in slowing your physiology back down to a calm and regulated state. This is the place where you have the opportunity to flourish, thrive and reach your potential.

Learn more about the vagal brake in my upcoming Vagus Nerve Masterclass. You'll learn and practice two series of trauma-sensitive regulation tools. These are bicep curls for your vagus nerve.