Resilience is not something you’re born with or without.
You’re resilient when you have more tools and resources than the challenges and stressors you’re facing.
Your capacity for resilience is being shaped by your mother’s stress levels before you’re born. Throughout your childhood, it’s influenced by your connections with other people.
The vagus nerve is myelinated throughout this period, right into adolescence. Myelin is the fatty coating around a nerve. Just like electrical wiring has a casing that helps impulses travel, your vagus nerve is myelinated by co-regulation, and this is what makes it function well and improves the conduction of electrical impulses.
These early life experiences echo throughout your life – especially in how you connect with other people and cope with and recover from stress.
If the vagus nerve is not working well, it’s measured as low vagal tone. Low vagal tone can mean prolonged stress, anxiety, shut-down, depression and nervous system dysregulation long after something that was stressful for you has ended. This means our resilience is also low.
Low resilience leads to survival responses being quickly turned on when you try to step outside your comfort zone. Pangs of nervousness can become panic and racing thoughts. Disappointment can lead to shut-down and feeling flat, numb and disconnected.
The goal isn’t to always be calm, but to have high flexibility, adaptability and high enough vagal tone to meet daily demands. With enough tools you can build a bank of resilience to help you weather periods of chronic and traumatic stress.
The vagal brake is a branch of the vagus nerve that helps you increase your resilience. You utilise it when you harness the heart’s pacemaker and this is a powerful way to regulate your nervous system and your stress responses.
When you feel waves of fear, overwhelm or disappointment hit you have access to responses other than fight-flight-freeze.
These survival responses limit your ability to think clearly and to make good choices that align with your values. The vagal brake helps you to stay present, be adaptable and bring balance to your nervous system.
You then have greater agency in shaping your life. You may feel waves of sensations as you face challenges without being swept up in a story that you’ll fail, or without the thoughts that you’re helpless and a situation is hopeless.
Resilience is something you can learn and it’s something you can reclaim despite your past. It requires practice and autonomic awareness to build. The rewards of this practice are an increased capacity to manage stress when you’re under pressure or facing conflict.
You can learn more about the vagus nerve and resilience in the Vagus Nerve Masterclass.