Your Vagus Nerve Called; It Wants A Calm Day

What if the fastest way to feel better isn’t more mindset hacks, but learning how safety actually feels in your body? We dig into embodiment and a clear, plain‑English take on polyvagal theory to show how your nervous system shapes your choices, your mood, and your health. Instead of piling on fixes, we focus on the three core states—ventral (safe and social), sympathetic (fight or flight), and dorsal (shutdown)—and how each one colours your day, from your breath and digestion to your relationships and boundaries.

We share simple practices that work in real life: naming sensations with nuance so your brain can hear your body, lengthening the exhale to signal calm, using orienting and gentle voice to cue safety, and creating tiny rituals that fit into minutes, not hours. You’ll learn why you cannot think your way out of stress, how safety unlocks clear thinking and healing, and how consistency turns micro‑moments into resilience. We also introduce a 30‑day nervous system reset journal designed to build awareness, regulation, reflection, and integration—plus a children’s version to help young people grow up fluent in the language of their bodies.

If you’ve felt anxious, flat, or stuck in overdrive, this conversation offers a map and the smallest next steps to move toward calm. Expect clarity about the vagus nerve, practical embodiment tools, and an empowering reminder that every small shift today is a gift to your future self. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a gentle nudge toward safety, and leave a review to help others find their way back to their bodies.

Order your 31 day reset journal here.

Transcript

Welcome And Series Roadmap

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer.

Naomi Mills 0:41

Hello and welcome to episode 9. I am so delighted that you are here. I can't believe actually that this podcast that didn't exist in anything other than my heart and head for so many years has only been around a couple of months, and here we are on episode nine, knocking on the door of episode 10, which is going to be our review episode, kind of putting together everything that we've covered in this first part of the podcast.

Embodiment And Polyvagal Basics

Naomi Mills 1:10

I like to think of it as a bit of an arc, a little bit of a series. And then the second series we're going into is going to be the embodied series. So really looking into the body, going into some other aspects of my work as a master firewalking instructor and empowerment coach. So we're going to talk about firewalking and breath work and why you might want to walk on broken glass for your health. And then the third arc, which is as far as I have dreamed thus far, is going to be the mindset series, really looking into how the mind is responsible for creating a lot of our health and our experience. And the embodiment part, of course, is about how our relationship with our bodies is creating our health and our experience. And that is actually the topic of today's podcast is embodiment and a little bit of polyvagal theory, because everybody likes to talk about the vagus nerve these days. And I'm not sure that we all understand it that well.

Survival States And Disconnection

Naomi Mills 2:14

I will say that my own personal superpower, as I like to call it, is I like to make bigger concepts simple. So I get it. If you are a real science buff and you've gone into this super, super deep, this might seem a little bit simplistic for you. But in my 20 plus years of healthcare experience, making complicated things simple is far more helpful to people than going to kind of the nth degree of detail. But if that's what you're looking for, please go ahead and find your sources and resources for that. But if, like me, you just want to know what do I want to know that's reliable and useful that I can apply to help my own life and health, this is where you want to be.

Naomi Mills 3:04

So when our deep survival stress states get activated, which can happen through personal trauma or certainly through the collective trauma of something like living through a pandemic where humans are a herd species, and if you believe that your neighbor or your friend can become a threat, can kill you. So you isolate them or you isolate yourself. These things are really activating our stress survival mechanisms at their deepest part, this ventral vagus nerve. And what happens within you as an individual is that you become disconnected from who you are emotionally and biologically. Biologically, you're running on this survive pattern that we're simply not designed to live in, although many of us do.

Why Safety Beats Positive Thinking

Naomi Mills 3:59

But biology is really what colors our behavior. So what I mean by that is if your threat system is activated, it's going to create a completely different filter on your life and the choices you make and therefore the behaviors you do than when it's not, when you feel safe and held. And so today I want to talk about using the principles of embodiment, tuning in and listening to your body to help recognize what state you're running in and start to deactivate it. Because when your nervous system feels safe, you're going to breathe more deeply, you're going to digest your food properly, you're going to think more clearly, you're going to heal more efficiently, and you're going to feel calmer and more connected.

Naomi Mills 4:50

And surely these are all things that we would like for ourselves because we certainly deserve them. And for many of us, several times a day, the nervous system can shift into this survival state even when there's no real threat or danger in sight. But here's the kicker you cannot think your way out of stress, you cannot logic yourself out of stress. And one of the most powerful things that polyvagal theory teaches us is that healing doesn't come from only thinking differently. It comes from that feeling of safety inside the body.

Building A Language For Sensations

Naomi Mills 5:37

And that's exactly the work that I feel called to do with my clients, either through this podcast, through my book, through my chiropractic work, and through my self-empowerment work as well. Everything is about getting you out of your head and noticing what's going on in your body. I was at a conference a few months ago and a speaker gave a great lecture on this very topic. And one of the things that really stuck with me was when she said that as humans, we are actually really poor as a community at giving words to how our bodies feel. We normally say, yeah, we're good, we're fine, maybe because we're British or we don't want to take up somebody's time, but also because we are not connected to our bodies, so we don't immediately know what feeling or emotion or sensation is happening there. And then secondly, because we don't practice it enough to even have developed the language, language like light, heavy, buzzy, energized, anything that's beyond okay, good, bad, fine.

The Three Nervous System States

Naomi Mills 6:56

Because these terms actually don't give real insight into what the body is feeling. But this is the work that you really need to do to lead a longer and happier life. That's what the science shows us. So polyvagal theory, which was developed by a man called Dr. Stephen Porgis, has three main states that your nervous system can move through. And it fits super well with everything we've been talking about this in this podcast. So we have the safe and social model, which he calls ventral vagal, and that's when we feel calm, present, open, and grounded, and the body is in healing mode. And that's what all of my work is about helping people create that state for themselves through body work, through mindset work, and through self-development.

Naomi Mills 7:57

Then there's the fight or flights, which is the sympathetics. We see this a lot, maybe feelings of anxiousness, restlessness, tension, or when you're easily overwhelmed. And this is also then reflected in your body with tight muscles, slow digestion, your breathing becoming shallow. It's a place where many of us live without even realizing it. And then there's a more, I want to say in little quotes, like serious biological reaction, which is this freeze or shutdown state, this dorsovagal state, which is numbness, feeling flat, exhausted, disconnected, or even that feeling of hopelessness. And it's where your nervous system has gone beyond fight or flight and into shutdown mode. And this happens after very deep trauma or after long periods of stress or trauma. And over time, getting to understand where your system is at, how it's regulating, and all the things you can do to help it to become more regulated into this safe social, we call it the parasympathetic state, the opposite of that survival drive.

Regulation Through Embodiment

Naomi Mills 9:18

That's going to allow you to address life with way more flexibility and build some stress resilience. And for me, apart from the body work that I deliver in my professional life, a huge key to that is this embodiment work, doing everything we can to tune back into what is happening in the body. And one of the things I did last December was I created a 30-day return to your nervous system reset journal. And for each day, there is a question, an invitation. And these questions are all about listening to your body. Things you might not necessarily journal about or ask yourself. Things like, what does healing mean to me?

Naomi Mills 10:13

What's my body telling me today? Noticing how you breathe when you feel safe or when you feel hurried. It's about tuning into the body's subtle signals and signs. Noticing what happens inside you when you become still. When I create time for myself, what feelings, emotions, or judgments come up? And so these might sound like simple questions, but when you take time to go into them, you're going to notice lots of layering of your family conditioning, social conditioning, personal conditioning coming up through simply noticing what physiological changes are happening, what emotions are stirring, what sensations are stirring in your body when you ask it these questions.

The 30‑Day Nervous System Journal

Naomi Mills 11:16

And so with my reset journal, we go through a four-week process. First of all, we've got to awaken awareness and develop a habit of taking time to do some self-reflection and tuning into the body. Then we go into regulation and calm, which is just small daily practices that are going to allow your nervous system to calm, to regulate. And obviously, the more often we do this, the easier it becomes. And then week three is looking more at how your inner state, in terms of your emotional and mental well-being, get reflected in the body, and vice versa. And week four is about gathering it all together, integrating and living the changes. Because these practices, everything we talk about in this podcast, and last week was a great one about the future self and about how putting time, energy, and consciousness into the health and life you want to have when you're older needs to start today, and it needs to be hardwired neurologically in your brain because it needs behavioral change today.

From Awareness To Integration

Naomi Mills 12:35

These aren't things that we can just do once, and they're not things that life makes space for. So a lot of this deep work in this podcast is about hopefully giving you enough compelling reasons and exciting overviews that you will start to shift your values in a way that looking after yourself and your health and investing time, money, and energy in that becomes way higher on your priority list than most of it is. When we flip that around a bit and make sure that your internal landscape and your body is right and healthy first, that completely changes the game on how much you are able to give others and for how long and with how much freedom, and then they benefit, and you benefit because you're not doing things that are going to be detrimental to your mental, physical, or emotional health. So there was my little inspiration on embodiment.

Prioritising Health And Boundaries

Naomi Mills 14:56

There is a sample of the nervous system journal going onto the website under the resources section. I still have some physical journals available. So if you want one posted out to you, you'll be able to purchase one on there. And the really cool thing is, and we'll go into this in a completely separate episode, is I've done one for children as well. Because imagine if you as a child got that language of how to describe what's going on in your body. If you normalized, if we normalize for our young people, that it is not only okay to tune into yourself, honour your body, your emotions, say no to things, look after yourself first, but actually it's the right thing to do to create your own health and to help other people ultimately. That's a real game changer.

Naomi Mills 15:47

And every day for both the adults and the child version, there is a very simple daily embodiment practice. And I love that I have this just sat in front of me for inspiration, and I've randomly opened it on day 29, which following on from the future self episode that came out last week and me referring back to it now, the daily practice on day 29 says, Imagine yourself 20 years from now. Look back from this moment at all the positive changes you've made and how it helped you become this magnificent version of your older self.

Journals For Adults And Children

Naomi Mills 16:33

So imagine yourself 20 years from now, looking back from the moment of you listening to a podcast, thinking, I really must start putting myself first, and just feel that sense of achievement and pleasure and goodness, how it's helped you become this real, embodied, happy, healthy version of your older self. Because every small change you make is a gift to your future self.

Naomi Mills 17:10

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparks something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.youareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have to be.