The Vagus Nerve's Role in Improving Gut Health, Anxiety, and Chronic Stress

Your psychological health is reflected in the functioning of your body's organs. Your organ functioning is reflected in your psychological health. This two-way relationship depends on the health of your VAGUS NERVE.

The vagus nerve is the two-way communicator between your brain and your organs. 80% of its fibres send sensory information from the body to the brain that changes how you feel, think and act. The 20% of the fibres that run from the brain to the body provide regulation to the heart, lungs and the gut. So many chronic health diseases are manifested from long-term stress or from a history of trauma.

Chronic and traumatic stress can inhibit the vagus nerve's ability to regulate your nervous system, leading to changes in almost all of your body's systems. When digestive issues show up you might think it's the stomach that's the problem. What's often found in many gut disorders is that there's a dysregulation of the nervous system, and it's a SYMPTOM of a chronic stress disorder. The vagus nerve is interrupted from regulating your organs because of this dysregulation.

Chronic stress disorders can lead to things like irritable bowel syndrome, because anxiety causes the survival brain to inhibit or excessively excite the vagus nerve. It's connection from the brain stem to the digestive tract causes gut motility (movement of food through the digestive tract) to stop, causing constipation, or excessively speed up, causing diarrhoea.

Prolonged changes in gut motility causes pain, impacts the gut microbiome and can create a histamine response, causing inflammation. The twisting, churning, chronic pain can change sensory areas in the brain, which make it more sensitive. These sensations can even signal to the survival brain that there's a threat when there's nothing wrong externally driving more anxiety.

Symptom "flare ups" often happen in periods of excess stress when anxiety levels rise, you have looping fear thoughts and you can’t switch off and relax. Due to the inseparable brain-body connection, your body then can't move into the state where rest and repair happen and where inflammation is reduced. Or, flare ups may arise if stress has caused you to sink into feeling flat, depressed disconnected and dissociated from the body this also causes changes in the immune system and circulation.

Other chronic stress disorders include chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune issues, allergies, migraines, cardiovascular issues and other gut disorders.

They all can arise because prolonged or traumatic stress dysregulates the nervous system. This flows on to dysregulate the hormonal and immune systems too.

Wouldn't it be helpful to reconceptualise what health and illness are to include your ability to regulate your nervous system and the current state of your vagus nerve? Understanding how chronic and traumatic stress can interrupt the bi-directional communication between the brain and the body and addressing it, could get the root of many chronic health issues, rather than just treating the symptoms each time they show up. Separating the brain, body and systems misses the big picture when it comes to health.

Psychological and physical resilience come as a package - learn to regulate your nervous system and you experience less anxiety, depression, emotional overwhelm and your physical health improves too. This means less pain, improved digestion, a healthier gut microbiome, better sleep, reduced inflammation and more energy.