Vagus nerve disorders
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 upwards from the body’s organs like the digestive system and cardio-respiratory system up to the brain. This changes how you think, feel and act.
The fibres that run from the brain to the body provide regulation to the heart, lungs, gut and other systems.
Chronic and traumatic stress 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 found in many chronic gut disorders is that there’s a dysregulation of the nervous system, and it’s a symptom of a vagus nerve disorder. The vagus nerve is interrupted from regulating your organs.
Vagus nerve disorders, or low vagal tone, can lead to things like irritable bowel syndrome, because anxiety causes anxiety to inhibit, or excessively excite the vagus nerve. Its 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 may cause pain, impact the gut microbiome and create inflammation.
Symptom “flare ups” from a vagus nerve disorder often happen in periods of excess stress when your anxiety levels rise, you have looping fear thoughts and you can’t switch off. Due to the inseparable mind-body connection that the vagus nerve creates, your body doesn’t move into the state where rest and repair happen, and where inflammation is reduced.
Flare-ups may also arise in the periods of excess stress that have caused you to sink into feeling flat, depressed, disconnected and dissociated from your body – the disorder causes changes in your immune system and circulation
Other vagus nerve disorders include: chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune issues, migraines, cardiovascular issues, heart arrhythmias, hypertension and other gut disorders. They all can arise because prolonged or traumatic stress dysregulates the nervous system, and this impacts the immune and endocrine systems too.
Wouldn’t it be helpful to reconceptualise what health and illness are so that they 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 to the root of many chronic health issues.
Learn more about vagus nerve disorders in the Vagus Nerve Masterclass.