Stress, Your Immune System & the Vagus Nerve

This episode highlights the intricate relationship between stress, immunity, and the vagus nerve, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a healthy vagal tone for overall well-being. Practical techniques including deep breathing, singing, and improving gut health are shared to help listeners cultivate resilience and reduce chronic stress effects. 

• Understanding the vagus nerve's role in stress and immune function 
• Acute vs. chronic stress impacts on health 
• Importance of maintaining high vagal tone for resilience 
• Techniques for strengthening vagal tone, including breathing exercises 
• Role of humming and singing as natural remedies 
• Gut health's contribution to immune function 
• Accessible strategies to combat chronic stress 
• Encouragement to integrate practices into daily routines

Chapters

• 0:01 Unlocking Wellness
• 13:08 Accessible Wellness Practices for Everyone

Transcript

Emily: 0:01

Welcome to It Starts at Vagus, the podcast where holistic health meets modern living.

Emily: 0:07

I'm Emily, your guide to unlocking the power of the vagus nerve, which is your body's ultimate key to calm, connection and overall well-being. Together, we'll explore simple ways to nourish your mind and body with natural remedies, actionable tips and empowering stories. Whether you're here to reduce stress, restore balance or take charge of your health, you're in the right place, because wellness doesn't just happen. It starts at Vagus.

Emily: 0:35

Let's dive in the relationship between stress, our immunity and the vagus nerve is deeply intertwined with the autonomic nervous system that's just a fancy way of saying our nervous system. That works automatically. We don't have to worry about it, think about it, it just does it. And the vagus nerve plays a central role in regulating both the stress response and the immune function in our body, so it makes it a key player in our overall health. When the body perceives stress, whether it's psychological so work is, we're under a lot of pressure at work or if it's physical, like an illness, we're feeling sick when that happens, our body releases cortisol from our adrenal glands, which is great. That's what it should be doing. And when working properly, cortisol is a great team player, but too much of it or too often, is where the problem starts arising. Short-term stress, which is called acute stress, can help. It can boost our immune function by mobilizing immune cells and saying hey, let's get to work. A great example for that for acute stress would be fasting. Fasting can be great for the body. It can tell your cells okay, let's get rid of these cells that are kind of acting weird or they're sickly and they're just not functioning the way that we need to for optimal health, and fasting can really help that. But when we're not intaking nutrients with food, it does give our body a short-term form of stress.

Emily: 2:30

Now chronic stress, however. It suppresses our immune system and our defense goes down and at the same time inflammation increases. So it's that chronic, long-term which creates a bigger problem. And the chronic stress actually lowers our lymphocyte levels, and lymphocytes are just white blood cells that help fight infections. They destroy harmful cells and regulate our immune system and our response to that at the same time. So when we have lower levels of lymphocytes, we are more prone to infections and illnesses are twice as likely to develop colds when exposed to bacteria or viruses, because their immune system is already pooping out. It's already been doing a job for so long and when it comes around someone who is sick, they're just already so pooped out that they're like I can't take anymore. Pooped out that they're like I can't take anymore. And then they get sick and then they're down longer and it takes them a longer time to feel better. And that's why we're trying to calm down our stress and how we respond to stress and making that chronic stress level less intense and making it go down to where it's no longer chronic, it's manageable. And so when that stress goes down lower, cortisol goes down lower. So now you're probably thinking, okay, great, let's just lower cortisol levels and we'll just make cortisol back to a team player.

Emily: 4:26

And that's where that nervous system, the vagus nerve, comes in. The vagus nerve is the main key to our parasympathetic part of our nervous system. It's responsible for activating the rest and digest state and how it responds to stressors. So it can say, okay, this is a stress, but it's not that big of a deal, we can deal with it, cope like, address it and then come back to that rest and digest state. So the vagus nerve directly communicates with our immune system, the cells in our spleen, the cells in our spleen, our liver, our gut, and so when that vagal tone is low in our body, that's where it's associated with higher stress, anxiety, inflammation. But when we use that vagus nerve in a positive way and have high vagal tone, that enhances our resilience and truly creates that natural immune function in our body to where we don't need to always supplement as much, we can bounce back faster so that if we come across someone who is sick, it's okay. Our body's like okay, we're not. We don't have high chronic stress, so we can address dealing with this bacteria or virus or whatnot because we're getting enough sleep, we're calm and we can attack it straightforward. It can be our main focus versus if we're working on all these other things at the same time. Our main focus versus if we're working on all these other things at the same time and we're saying, oh, we're tired because we've been working so long on this other stress and we're not sure we're safe. And now we're getting less sleep, now we're really pooped out. It's just a lot on our body. So learning how to activate and support our vagus nerve really will help reduce that stress and boost immunity at the same time, because it does play a key role in calming the nervous system and regulating everything our immune system, how our body digests food. So it's an active key to stress reduction and that balance in our body.

Emily: 6:51

Let's talk about applying it to a life because, again, knowledge is great, but we need to apply that knowledge. So how can we strengthen that vagal tone? Well, deep breathing. Deep breathing is going to be great for this, because it helps lower heart rate down, activates that vagus nerve. You can do it a variety of different ways. There's not a right or wrong way of breathing. Let me correct this For short-term breathing there's not a right or wrong. It's where we, if we were to chronically breathe with our shoulders and where we lift our shoulders up and down, that's going to tire out your upper traps in your body and that's where, like the shoulder pain and neck pain, headaches start coming from. So we always want to get into habitual breathing with our diaphragm.

Emily: 7:43

But as for practice breathing, focus breathing, it's really just about slowing things down. Breathing, it's really just about slowing things down, whether you're doing two quick inhales and one long exhale, or if you're doing the box breathing, where you breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds and then hold again for four seconds. That's a great one too. You just need to figure out what is your favorite style of slowing down your breathing, focusing on it, and that is what's going to be effective. So, again, just kind of play around with it, see how you like to do focus breathing.

Emily: 8:22

And a double perk to the breathing is what I'm talking about breathing for this exercise. It's because with that breathing, obviously it's going to bring oxygen all over your body and you can even visualize it. You can visualize, so, closing your eyes, you visualize in your mind where, when you breathe in that oxygen, you can visualize where that oxygen is going. Is it going to your brain? Is it going to your lungs? Are you bringing it all the way down to your fingertips, because oxygen needs to get there too? Are you going to visualize bringing oxygen to an area of your body that hurts? So if you have neck pain, are you visualizing it there? Because with that the oxygen will help everything feel better. Your body needs oxygen. It's when you have oxygen in one place that is where an area of sickness is going to decrease. So, again, then we bring in. When we breathe in deeply, we bring in more circulation. Circulation brings more nutrients to those body parts All around. It's a win-win. So we can just breathe in, get oxygen everywhere in our body and that oxygen will help again fight off sickness. Second one humming or singing. That vibration when we hum or sing that can actually break up any sinus congestion. So we're going to break up that sinus congestion, bring oxygen to that area and then that vibration will strengthen your vagal tone. So again, wins all around.

Emily: 10:14

And last one we're going to talk about is just your gut health in general. 80% of your immune system resides in the gut, is kind of what. The base that I see at different studies. I kind of say about 80%. And the vagus nerve is directly connected to the gut, connects the gut and the brain and it's the go to the messenger. So it says, hey, brain, this is what the gut's doing and the gut's going. Hey, the gut goes. Hey, vagus nerve, tell the brain what I'm doing down here. So it's kind of that constant communication.

Emily: 10:51

So if you keep your gut flora, healthy, variety of fruits and vegetables, knowing your body, if you're intolerant, then don't eat as much of that certain food. I personally really like to decrease sugar, I like to increase my herbs. All those things help the gut and having a variety of food so helpful Because all the different let's just say, vegetables. A carrot is going to have different nutrients than, let's say, an onion, and so they're going to complement vegetables. A carrot is going to have different nutrients than, let's say, an onion, and so they're going to complement together. There's going to have some similarities but they're going to fill in holes in nutrients that the one will be missing. So you're going to get a clear picture and you're going to have complementary nutrients and that will help again the gut flora.

Emily: 11:52

So, all in all, I just wanted to make a point on how that chronic stress really does weaken our immune system and that the vagus nerve is just that natural bridge between the nervous system, the immune system. Reducing that inflammation, enhancing our resilience, that's what we really really want. We really want to be resilient to anything that comes our way, because we don't know what life is bringing at us. But we can be prepared, and a prepared part is being able to be resilient to that stress so it doesn't become chronic. Because, again, chronic is where all of our body systems get tired and it's usually not one. It usually, you know, picks on one area more than another, but it does affect the whole body and so strengthening that vagal tone significantly can improve your stress tolerance, your immune function, and it's, in my opinion, a crucial strategy in today's high stress environment our whole world.

Emily: 13:08

And my favorite part is that these practices are so accessible to everyone who wants to implement into their wellness routine. It's not just a certain group can have it, or if you can buy this new high tech function function, it is literally for everyone, and that is why I love sharing it with people. It's a passion of mine to help people feel better using their nervous system, so that we can be resilient in life, so we can have a happier life, an easier life and just enjoy it all all around, not get sick. That's a good plan. So remember to breathe and do something happy that will make you smile today. Thanks for listening to. It Starts at Vagus. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you're ready to take the next step toward calm, grab my free Vagus nerve reset video in the show notes. It's quick and easy way to start feeling better today and until next time, remember wellness starts at Vagus.