I am Ann Alton, coming to you again to talk to you about the vagus nerve and other ways that you can use it to help your nervous system calm down. Remember the vagus nerve from the previous video? It regulates the body’s organs while at rest so you can digest and do other normal bodily functions that you would not be able to do if you were in a fight or flight situation. So these are things that give your body the idea that you’re safe. This turns off basically or turns down when you are in fight or flight. Most of the time we’re pretty safe it’s just the pain or irritation or the news or whatever that is is getting us into a higher state of arousal and we want to make sure that our bodies are functioning correctly. So we want to make sure that we keep our nervous systems are nice and comfortable and in a happy rhythm.
What does dysregulation look like? it’s all kinds of moodiness, poor decisions, pain, slow digestion, high blood pressure, and more. Regulation is calm collected connected with people appreciative of our surroundings, feeling happy, digestion is working well, etc. Caring for this can mean a healthier immune system it can mean better regulation of hormones, so better regulation of diabetes blood pressure. It can mean less pain or even if the pain is the same it can mean less suffering associated with the pain better and able to tolerate it. It can mean better relationships making better decisions having better sleep. so it can do a lot for you.
Why don’t we just tell ourselves “calm down”? Because that is a thinking brain response and our fight or flight or rest and digest systems – those are autonomic nervous system things – like digesting; things that we can’t control with our brains on purpose. Those are survival brain things and they don’t speak the same language. We have to learn how to speak the survival brain language in order to get our nervous system to calm down.
Today we’re going to go through breathing and gargling – note that some of these exercises may actually do things to trigger you to feel less safe and more aroused and if that happens please stop doing them. We’re going to go through a few quick grounding techniques to bring you back down to your regular state after we do these other techniques, so stick around. Sometimes the techniques can trigger some things in us way back in our past may have caused some us to feel unsafe.
The first thing is breathing. I want to say you can just Google this one because there are a million different ways to breathe and not all of them are going to work for every single person. I’m gonna go through one really quick one today but there are so many ways to do this that you have to just try them and see what works well for you.
The breathing techniques that I’m going to do today is basically just breathing out twice as long as you’re breathing in. So if you breathe in for one you breathe out for two so one two, or breathe in for count of two and out for four. You can increase that and gradually lengthen the length of your breath so you’re “in two, out two three four, in two, out two three four”. You can go three to six, and see how far you can go. It doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect so if you don’t make it to six you only make it to five that’s not a big deal. The idea is that you are breathing out for longer than you’re breathing in. The reason why that works is because every time you breathe in you activate your fight or flight system and when you breathe out you’re activating your rest and digest system so you’re kind of bouncing between these two all day long and you know to maintain a certain arousal state! but as you breathe out for longer and you breathe in you’re giving that rest and digest a chance to catch up.
I am not going to demonstrate gargling to you! You know what it looks like. I think you all know what it sounds like and if you don’t you could probably could find a video of it on YouTube if you wanted to see it. The reason why that works is that the vagus nerve actually comes down the back of your throat and so it will serve to stimulate the back of your throat to stimulate that nerve and get it to working better.
So now if you found yourself getting a little bit more aroused while you were doing you know the breathing or if you while you’re gargling and you’re trying these things, don’t don’t fret. Just stop and do some grounding techniques now. Basically what you’re going to do is you’re going to sit and I have a chair behind me as an option, but I’m just gonna sit here actually because I’m comfortable. You’re going find your contact points. Right now I’m sitting in a kneeling position and so I’m gonna feel my my shins on the ground, I’m gonna feel my butt bones on my feet. If you’re sitting in a chair you can lean back you can feel the back of the chair on your back, you can feel your feet on the floor you, can feel your hands on your thighs – any of those places where your body touches something else, and if you need to you can you can use some movement to help to bring more attention to what you’re going to pay attention to. You’re speaking survival brain language, “hey, I am here I’m safe! this is now and not the past.”
The other thing you can do is you can come up with five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can smell, two things you can taste, and one thing that you can feel. Any combination of those things is okay. Those are a couple of ways that you can use to help down-regulate your system.
I find that it’s good to do one or two or maybe even three of them before I go to bed at night because sometimes one just one won’t work on its own. Good luck to you and I’d be interested to hear how these things are working out for you, so give me an email at ann@aaltonpt.com.
